I think the best way to describe this is:
FFXI did a fantastic job of bringing the "everquest" experience to consoles in a Final Fantasy Based world.
FFXIV did a fantastic job of bringing the "wow" experience to consoles in a Final Fantasy Based world.
It's not quite that simple, I know, but more or less that's the core difference: Forcing yourselves to work together to get things done in FFXI was simultaneously incredibly agonizing and incredibly rewarding. Today I would not want to go through that same agony as I am older and have far less free time, but it did have an awesome side effect of creating a "know everyone by reputation" environment. This meant if you were an ***, no one wanted anything to do with you (or at least you were condemned to playing alongside like-minded individuals). Because the game centered around text instead of voice (no built in voice chat options and ventrillo and teamspeak were reservered for twitch first person shooters for the most part) it meant party chat was heavily used and made it much easier to "join the conversation" of otherwise tight-knit cliques.
In today's MMO's it's a different world in the sense that most people that are close friends are talking via some form of chat, making it harder to "join the conversation". The intimate relationship of picking members of a group is nearly dead, as groups for events no longer rely explicitly on a "leader-based" system but instead a more accessible "free-for-all" "queue-based" systems where judgment of those invited is not passed by reputation, but instead a mindless "who queued first" computerized decision. By the time you do an event together, you are usually surrounded by people who just want to quickly "get the event over with" since many have likely done the events several times already, so people just jump into the action without discussion or thought - so it's not uncommon to complete a dungeon or event without so much as a single phrase being spoken aside from a "hello" at the start and a "thanks for the run!" afterwords. For the most part, these people may as well have been NPCs, which might very well be an even better solution so you don't have to deal with the riptide of insults and "OMG..." followed by someone bailing from the group the first time a mistake is made.
I see an onslaught of hate flying towards the OP, and perhaps a poor choice of wording incites this, but when I read the post, I can't help but agree that the nature of MMO's has changed enough to question how to reclaim that now-so-vary-rare "life long bond" with other players so many once felt.
One of my best friends is a player I met in FFXI, and while we are long past the days of FFXI, and I've yet to meet this person in real life, he's still a very important part of my life and I speak with him on a daily basis (whether we get a chance to relax and play a game together that week or not). It's difficult for me to imagine us being the friends we are today if we had met in the current generation of MMO's. Furthermore, he met his current wife in FFXI, I cannot even fathom that relationship taking root in this "smash and grab" generation of MMOs.
All that being said, I think this generation of games is a better generation of games, the problems I see tend to stem largely from our very human nature, driven by greed and the need to progress. I also see that while MMOs are intended to be the "social media" of video games, today they all lack a solid "social interface". Why is there no "in-game facebook" where I can look up "Captain Steve" and see what his interests are, read his bio and back story, and maybe learn something about his real life or schedule to know when we can play together in the future? If we are going to be as impersonal as we are today with MMOs, I think they should at the very least make an attempt to "allow" for more easily accessible social interaction, since forcing it isn't something we want, have time for, and in many cases, outright fear.