I personally failed to see the point with leveling up when I really didn't want to after the very first FC party I paid for. Not only can I do it AFK and do other things but I also get cruor which I could exchange into gil so I can FC more. I think leveling up at lower levels is very boring and mildly frustrating to solo with a job that's not very solo friendly. Hell if I got an offer to a traditional party I'd turn it down for FC anytime as I already did those traditional parties on two different characters all the way up to level 75/90 several times. So for me FC is a blessing that opens new ways of playing this game without all the work involved. Work can be fun, that's probably why I did it so many times but as time goes on I really don't feel like visiting Qufim Island for the 9000th time to level up a low level job under a level sync.

Leveling up has become very simple as you don't have to find a perfect combination to level up anymore, no need for skillchain, no need for a tank, no need for a refresher, all the monsters you're fighting check "easy prey" for the most part and if they don't, it'll prolly do so for the rest of the people in your alliance. When I level up with someone that does 2-3x more damage than I do, I pretty much lose interest in working hard since they're already doing most of the job. No real need for a healer when you fight EP mobs that chips off 10 damage off you on every hit either. So the part that made leveling up interesting for me isn't there anymore so I prefer just to blast through the levels, which brings me to skilling up.

Skilling up is probably one of the biggest waste of time you can do on this game. It's pretty imbalanced too when you compare skill up to different weapons. Dagger and scythe both have the same probability to skill up, but dagger is a lot faster than a scythe so you end up spending more time skilling up on latter one. Skilling up becomes faster if you get access to double attack, haste and those occasionally attacks x times weapons, yet all of that just is a pushover when you compare it to warrior's job ability retaliation. Go inside Abyssea, get regen atmas, put on pdt gear and hold a ton of mandragoras in front of you with retaliation on. Never have I skilled up a weapon faster! Retaliation is like Counter, except that you still take hits but hits from retaliation counts as skill up. I've recorded that I once hit 5 times per second as a result. It took me 8 hours to go from 200 to 300 on club. You can self skill chain too even if you're alone and that you have enough mobs and pdt to keep yourself alive making those weapon skill trials much faster. Unlocking polearm of trials took less than half an hour thanks to this. It's just a shame that no other jobs in the game can skill up as fast as warrior. I'd like to see my drk skill up just as fast.

The worst part of skilling up is probably the magic you throw on yourself or others such as enhancing magic or healing magic. I think neither of those skills levels up at all after a certain point, I could heal for hours on WHM and see one 0.1 skill up while my warrior is getting 10+ levels in weapons. Even parrying levels up faster than healing magic which I find incredibly infuriating. The only way I can skill up healing and enhancing on is to cheat like it was FF2. Nuking undead mobs with healing magic makes healing magic actually level and spamming protect on generals in besieged makes enhancing magic skill up. I fail to see why especially these skills have to be so time consuming to level up, isn't it enough that spells resist with capped magic? The best way I could think about leveling up those skills would be to go AFK with a bot running in the background so you don't have to do it manually. I'm very sure all of this is somewhat true to summoning magic or at least I know someone who leveled it up while botting.

Those two things are my main gripe with the game at the moment, jobs I don't feel like leveling up and skills I especially don't feel like doing. They made leveling up a million times faster but skilling up still takes forever. Why does skilling up have to be such a huge and monotonous grind? If I was in control, all the skills should be in blue.