Yeah, you have a point. The exploit-ness may be an issue. But, here is a suggestion:
If you are WHM/nin, then you can skill up healing, divine, enfeebeling and enhanching. But, you could not skill your ninjitsu:)
That could be a solution :D
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Actually, the original placeholder for character level went into triple digits, the level cap is and always has been a decision SE made dealing with game balance. Some of the worst NM's for the longest time were like level 80-85. Think there was a blurb a long time ago where they said they were technically set to go to level 120 or something with what was supported by the code (stat value increases and what not). Aside from job abilites, spells, armor, etc--increasing the level cap is more or less the matter of changing a paramater that puts the ceiling on your max level and populating the xp values for achiving the levels if they aren't already generated as well. All that code already exists and resources have been declared already.
What I was talking about is the functional design of the original code. There is a lot happening in the background when you job change, which may the reason they've restricted it to "city" areas where the PS2 environment has more assets available to handle swapping all the data through various tables when you job change. It probably isn't just the matter of toggling a value to unlock acess to spells and abilities when you zone to a city--they may be bound to a view that is only accessible when your job is set to the proper values. Changing this behavior could be a bit more complex then just creating a new view that allows you to see/trigger all your spells in the magic list. For starters, it has to preload not only all the assets required for the animations..but the calculations as well. you have the animations loaded for other people to cast the magic, but not all the logic that goes along with those spells (not to mention the whole mp issue as well). Right there you could be ramping up what has to get loaded into memory when you zone in to the city, then you'll have to shed all that when you zone back out to free memory to load all the additional assets for the adventuring areas.