There's much better gear. People who do not swap gear on BLU are, quite frankly, imbeciles. Do not be one of them. Examples of gear sets may be found on
my FFXIAH page. Mavi head, body, and legs are acceptable pieces for TP until you acquire the harder to get pieces in those sets. Aim for the big hitters of DD stats for your TP set, focusing on DEX, Double Attack, Triple Attack, Accuracy, Attack, and Critical Hit Rate. The rest should be self explanatory and you should be able to draw reasonable conclusions as to what would be good in what slot based on my sets.
Don't know if any of it has been transcribed onto wikis yet, but I have a
compendium of BLU spell modifiers and effects (magnitude and durations included).
WAR, RDM, NIN, and DNC are the only critical ones. WAR is your general purpose DD sub, RDM is mainly for cleaving and solo, NIN is for more defensive-offensive play (and sometimes soloing), and DNC is for Dynamis. Some would suggest SCH for Campaign, but I prefer /RDM.
Not really. It gets better the higher you go; the sheer amount of things that you can do with BLU if you know how to play the job is greater than any other.
More or less, however DD is the niche that we excel best at.
The spell itself? Yeah. It's good at lower levels until you get a stronger cure (Wild Carrot will be your next one). As for learning it, welcome to BLU. Some spells will give you no trouble, others will want to make you tear your hair out in disdain. It's all worth it in the end.