Seems like you're moving the goal posts a bit. First it was "gil has no use". Now it's "gil doesn't make you more powerful".
Gil absolutely has uses, and the comparisons I made are perfectly fine. It's just that XIV isn't being designed in such a way to entice people to buy it lol.
I didn't - I just said that Gil in XIV doesn't matter enough to design a XIV token.
Generally playing XIV (whatever you do) will earn you gil. Generally playing WoW will cost you gold, which you'll have to make up with grinding and/or the WoW Token.
50 mil is actually a lot for those of us who don't have Market Board autism and it can be difficult to accumulate said wealth without playing into exactly the type of autism that makes people their absolutely ludicrous amounts of gil hand over fist. Not to mention that fact that you have to technically compete with several other motherfuckers to even attain your Monoplay play money because those clowns want to be "in-game rich" as well.
The value in gil comes less from practical applications (at least outside of convenient pre-raid gearing, and I'll circle back around to that point in a minute) and more that it facilitates some artificial measure of value attributed towards the purely cosmetic aspect of the game. With that consideration in mind, a lot of mats specific to that in particular are not, actually, all that easy to farm. Some of them are locked behind Extremes and Savage, which a lot of people are too retarded to do (and usually a savvy "crafter" is going to either be with a raid team who can farm consistently, or they're going to pay a raid team to bring them back said rare mats if they should drop. Usually most of the people realize there's more profit to be had in disguising their intent as goodwill, so they'll kiss ass like hell to these people so that they'll be inclined to give said mats away for free – usually because they've tended to establish themselves as THE FC crafter or something to that effect), and others, particularly the ones tied to whatever the newest glamour outfit they just added to the game, tend to be tied to the treasure map dungeons, and said mats are usually only attainable from successfully completing a full run of those dungeons, which is, as far as I know, entirely RNG dependent.
Beyond that scope, gil is basically used as a shortcut to have things. Don't have your crafters leveled or know anybody that would be willing to do you a favor? Don't want to have to wait to grind out materia and/or materia tokens? Don't want to have to wait just as long and slowly accumulate better gear? Crops growing too slow, retainers are having some shit RNG with what they bring back, airships and submarines aren't bringing you back exactly what you want? You want something right then and there and you don't care to wait on it? You buy what you want off the Market Board. That's basically the long and short of that whole explanation.
Of course, gil also has its measure of influence on people in-game as well, and you can pull a lot of social manipulation among the playerbase through the exchange of currency, as with any currency whatsoever regardless of its practicality and utility.
To declare gil this absolutely worthless thing either means you're ignorant, ridiculously self-sufficient, or you have/make so much of it that it's never an immediate concern for you.
There's a lot here, but...
50 Mil is supposed to be a lot - it's literally the most expensive gil-sink mount in the game or the cost of an entire personal mansion, but it's also extremely attainable. The Market Board in XIV is drastically less competitive/cut-throat because it's extremely hard to bot and most users are limited to 40 "slots" to sell items from.
There are no materials locked behind current Savage or Extreme tiers, they are typically added ~4 years later (aka 2 expansions), when they can be easily done at max level. For example, Susano (from Stormblood) has mats that drop from EX weapons - but you don't exactly need a full sweaty raid team to go in at level 90 and exploded a level 70 boss, it might even be soloable (haven't tried) or duoable. Having any crafting class at level 1 (meaning you just unlocked it) will let you desynth and get mats from the weapons - you don't need a dedicated "desynther" (aka Enchanter in WoW).
Treasure Map mats are random, but, also shit out money, tokens, and materials for every thing you do in them (even the maps that don't open portals). The maps are super easy to come by (any high level gatherer gets one "for free" every 18 hours) and are always worth doing - and are fun on top of that.
Gil as a shortcut is spot on - but even then it isn't super necessary. Leveling crafters is a breeze via levequests and the game actually stops you from being able to buy the finished products at several points during the process. You can use gear to slingshot your power level a bit, but you
still have to do all of the MSQ and go through every single dungeon at least once so there's not a major point in doing so, as those dungeons would sync your gear down to a lower level anyhow.
On top of that - there's virtually no "new gear tax" in XIV. There are no enchants, no reforging, no armor packs or whatever - just (typically) 2 Materia slots. There are no random "World Drops", no super rare mobs (with silver plates) with super rare drops, no random kobold dropping a max level BoE worth 5,000,000 gold - it's all just predictable stuff.
I never said that Gil is completely worthless - just that it isn't a vital resource. No raider in XIV has ever sweat a repair bill or consumable cost because they're just so cheap. No raider (or raid team) has ever farmed gil in order to get some kind of competitive advantage over other teams (unlike WoW).
The main reason is that in XIV you
can much more easily be self sufficient and the game encourages you to do so (Armory Bonus, Levequets, Beast Tribes, etc) where as it's
way fucking harder in WoW,
