Why is Housing even desired?

So I think it might be worthwhile to review why people even want housing, particularly given the "Murder Hobo" trope that seems to pervade games like ours.

A lot of it, for me, is simply the same allure that dollhouses had when I was a pre- and teen-ager: the ability to create a fantasy of a place where I would like to live, and to include things that I don't have the resources to include in my real life living place. I had some pretty elaborate dolls, and created some pretty elaborate doll furnishings, which taught me things about carpentry, sewing, and origami. The advantage of my BJDs was that I could make anything for them within the scope of my imagination and skill at creation. The disadvantage was the expense, and the fact that, at the end of the day, a doll is still a doll.

The advantage of housing in a game like Final Fantasy X|V is that our characters, our "dolls," move around in a life-like way and interact with the environment we create; they provide a better proxy for the player than a doll does. And, the expensive of materials for the creation of that environment is much lower... really, just the subscription fee and the time we put into the creation. On the other hand, the ingredients we can use to create the environment are limited to what the developers decide we might want, and choose to implement for us. With only two years of game history, and less than that of housing history, the options are relatively small. That's something that will change as time goes on and more housing content is developed.

One of the joys of playing with dollhouses is the ability to show them off to your friends. I remember many a pleasant afternoon spent on the floor in front of our dollhouses with my best friend Dorinda when I was a teen. This was the aspect that was missing in FFXI... only the character themselves could enter the MogHouse, so you were limited to screenshots, or showing off your house to people who could physically see your computer monitor.

FFXIV has taken care of that aspect, by the way they've implemented housing. I have a very small FC, and we have a small house. We're reasonably active with the house, but at the market boards, I really only ever see the members of one other FC, so it's not like there's any sense of community created by the neighborhood arrangement that FFXIV has come up with. It was nice to be able to use our stables to change the colors of our chocobos, and to raise onions in our gardens, but honestly, we've used maybe 1% of the potential of either utility.

For us, the current arrangements of housing make no difference. Indeed, they're holding us back from using the existing system to its full capacity. Allow me to explain. We initially purchased a small house, because that was what we could afford (we're a very small FC!). We'd like to move up to a medium house, but no medium plots are available on our server, in any housing area. Meanwhile, I at least would like to have a private room, but they cost 100k gil. We keep saying that, when one comes available, we'll move up to a medium plot; that means that any gil spent on private chambers, which cannot be moved from house to house, is wasted... and it's not pocket change we're talking about.

So I don't know what the solution is. I do know that we'd like to have a bigger house, but I also know that we're lucky to have secured a house when we did, so that we have one at all.

What's your reason for wanting housing?