I think the the reality is unless you have unlimited development bandwidth you kinda have to pick one or the other. I'm not too good for open-world games or anything either, but I can count the ones with stories I really enjoyed to the point of them staying with me on one hand.
Especially with something like FFXV, where the point of the story is watching these characters spend a long period of time together from location to location, the open-world takes away from that, it's distracting. Now someone will say that they bonded with the bros just fine going around to their gas stations and hunting their monsters and w/e and that's fine, but that's not what I'm talking about here; I'm talking about the actual labor of making the game they did and how that effects the execution of it.
If you make an open-world you have to make some semblance of all the stuff that goes in it—the fetch quests, the collectibles, etc—and on at least some level that takes time and effort away from being able to really handcraft specific things that would make the journey more memorable.
For me, getting on the train in XV was just an affirmation that, yeah, this game just shouldn't have been open-world to begin with. It should've been fairly linear with much more dialogue between the cast, way more one off moments, way more actual "road trip" stuff than camping and getting gas. FFX should've been a bigger influence on the game, to be quite honest.
