While True RPG is you roleplaying a role/character (D&D does pretty good at holding true to this kind of element) -- JRPGs are generally about story (sometimes mostly cliche) and massive...sweat-till-you-drop...unrealistic...grind.
FFXI is comparable to other FF's in the sense that for an MMORPG, Storyline emphasis is strong compared to any other MMO. Cutscenes are well put together as well as text, dialogue, and design. Great detail is put in to every FF storyline, because that's the general selling point (Aside from the music composition) of most Squaresoft/Square-enix titles, some chapters being more successful than others.
Those people who want to skip cutscenes can just spam through them as far as I'm concerned. The one thing that I did personally like about the pre-nerf difficulty of CoP was that if you were wearing one of the three Rings on completion of the missions, there was some sense of competency of having completed the entire set of missions that were supposed to be ungodly difficult -- Might I add the EXP loss during boss fights, the area level caps, the need to buy gear for each cap, etc?
If you have to sit through a few paragraphs of text just to get an uber set of gear (That very well outshines the reward that we gruelled through for painstaking hours), I think that trade off is pretty fair.