I didn’t think two men could have children?

At the same time though I played an old 2d MMO called Ultima Online for a about 5 years. You could do practically anything in that game given you understood how the game worked. Of course alot of that could be credited to the skill system instead of classes/levels.
Anyway, I was one of those people that preferred to go out lone wolf, I still am, mostly because I think people are dumb >_> ( and the WoW “community” has no doubt proved this….)
However, in UO, regardless of how I played the game, I still met up with a core group of friends, a very tight knit group of friends. Play the game long enough, and you’ll see how the community flourished the way it did, alot of credit can be given to the economy of the game, where not everyone was a crafter, you had to create the character knowing you wanted to take up that specific crafting specialty.

The point is…. There are simply way too many variables to consider when determining whether or not a MMORPG will have a flourishing community or not. Just like no single aspect of a game makes a good or bad game, no single aspect of the game makes a good or bad community in the game.

(rambling ends here)

My meaning of casual friendly is where I can log in to the game each evening knowing I’ll achieve a certain goal I set for myself, whatever that may be. As opposed to the hardcore route I took in FFXI which involved staying up until 5am every night and playing an obscene amount.

I guess WoW is casual friendly to the extreme, but it does still cater for hardcore players (though I don’t believe any “hardcore” WoW player is anywhere near as hardcore as how we used to play FFXI, but that’s another rant…)

I’m afraid this sentence here will destroy your precious “community”.
Look at WoW and its casual focus and what people that game attracts and you will see that the community they have compared to FFXI is horrendous (mildly put).

The “harcoreness” of FFXI was a great mechanism to remove people that really don’t belong in a “community”. As you described it perfectly, in FFXI one is heavily dependent on each other to progress in the game. And this will leave no room for people that are single minded or unsocial.

On the contrary WoW caters to exact those kind of player that don’t give a fuck about others and when reaching max level (solo play) they start to demand from the developers that they have the same right to items and gears as those that do it in group and raid. This is a road to damnation if FF14 follows the path that WoW has taken and this will with a 100% certainty destroy the community that you cherish so much.

I have a paladin and death knight. My hunter with his spec, with imp traps and volley and T8 gear, can do it 10 times faster for me.

I level alliance toons with a Death Knight Unholy. See paladins and dks are a quick fix, they can do it sorta fast with not that great of gear. But a hunter in T8 kicks it quicker for me.

ZF is obviously a valid alternative, there’s some nice places to line-of-sight pull packs, but I find the casters can still be an annoyance. I also wouldn’t leave SM until 40, that place is the best exp you’re going to see, it’s just too good to pass up, no matter how boring it might be!

So if you can’t handle being locked for 5 seconds again and again, ZF is probably more for your liking.
If you’re planning to only attack a few at a time, BRD is definitely where you should go.
(ZF can be started at 35 if SM gets too boring.)