As far as FF14 goes, it seems like you were playing a different game than I was. I quit FF11 back in 2008, but this wasn't much of a challenge at all to pick up. I did break out my PS2 to USB connector and played with my wireless PS2 controller. It only took me 10 minutes to figure out how to exit the town. (Bring the map up, there's an arrow pointing to zone boundaries...) The biggest problem I had initially was that they showed you the map of the outside and put the "go here" mark on it without telling you that it wasn't the map for where you were now. As for the multi levels, once you learn to read the map it's really easy to figure out where the paths up are. The only problem I ran into with the multi-levels was the few instances where there were underground caverns and it was hard to tell if the map was directing you to the ground level or the cave level for the quest objective. 

The crashing of the open beta was the only real problem I ran into, and the fact that so much of the text is still not translated. 

You're wrong about the 15 hours thing. It's not time based, it's based on experience. They estimate how much experience you would gain in an hour and use that amount of experience as the baseline for decreasing your experience. It's to help keep professional players from getting too far ahead of casual players. Say they think you can gain 10000 experience in an hour. You would get full experience until 80,000 exp is gained, no matter how long it takes you to get it.