My rule of thumb's always been if you want to play a bunch of cool, story driven, single player games then get a playstation, and if you want to invite your friends over and play some local multi you should grab an xbox. Personally I've always thought the xbox line of thinking is the way to go. Sadly this craze about graphics has turned consoles away from what they're meant to be and even halo 5, the franchise that set its foundation on local multiplayer, doesn't have splitscreen in favour of better graphics. It's sad to watch honestly.
I've only had a couple of months of experience with a PS4 over the christmas holiday last year. I don't like the controller very much. The flappy triggers don't feel great to use and I kept sliding off the convex joysticks. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with the system's OS. What I did notice was it produced a lot of heat. Like a lot. Air circulation is definitely something to be aware of with the PS4. It was super small though, a little bigger than a Wii.
I got an xbox one on the first day it was released. It was a poor decision and I wouldn't do it again. You should buy a console to play games, not to have a console. The box is really big and you shouldn't put anything on top of it that'll block the massive fan. Heat hasn't been an issue though. The controller felt weird at first, but after a few months I loaded up a few games on the 360 and I could immediately feel how much better the xone controller was. The backwards compatibility opens up the game library so much. The only reason I've turned on my 360 since they added it was to move all of my save files into cloud storage. The "looking for group" feature they added recently is amazing. Back in the day I had to message everyone I played with in halo 3 multi and ask them to help me get achievements in halo odst. Not any more. They've also recently made improvements to achievement tracking and you can pull up a small overlay to track your progress while you play.
But yeah to reiterate, splitscreen has always been the biggest draw to console gaming for me, and the xbox has better and more splitscreen games.
I don't think multiple accounts is their reason for blocking this. Just about the only thing that would be tradable would be the spell traces and its clear they have no qualms with giving them out in large quantities all the time. As usual there'll be some kind of technical issue that's too much for them. It'll likely be the same reason we didn't get the updated cash shop.
Just about every aspect of these changes hurts the game for no good reason. Everything about the meso changes is poor. I don't get it. Converting the reindeer milks and sunrise dews into a meso item is kind of pointless. We'll still have to go to a vendor (post-change a specific vendor in the fm) to sell the items we don't want to hold onto so if the goal was to reduce the inconvenience well... they've made it worse. We also lose the benefit of being able to use the potions if we want to. The meso value for each boss isn't even all that balanced. For example why is CHT only worth 300k more than HT? Why is easy Cygnus worth 3x normal Magnus? And the 60 weekly limit... why? Outside of Reboot nobody does the bosses for raw money, so I really don't get what this change was meant to do.
The entry limits seem to run counter to whatever reason I can think of. I don't see how reducing the entry limits will improve the game, nor is there any kind of thematical sense to it. Maybe the goal was to get more people into training fields? For all the good that does. The new accessories from Damien and Lotus look alright, they're not all that much better than the sweetwater stuff but at least it gives GMS a reason to down them regularly.