This is a serious anachronism. Lowering the requirements so that you could skill up on decent challenge mobs was a good start. However, the system as is only made sense back when XP rates were so slow, and level sync was nonexistent, so you could actually keep your skills up as you levelled. As it is now, skills lag way behind even if you DON'T leech all your levels. I recently took WAR from 50-77 in level synced GOV pages in Garlaige and Crawler's Nest and my axe and great are so far behind that if I try to fight anything in Abyssea, I miss constantly.

I've been training on the fortalices in Castle Zvahl, but even that takes forever and I have to keep checking back every 45 minutes after destroying one of the things. I guess it beats staying at the keyboard fighting monsters that can fight back, but it still sucks.

So I dunno, maybe ease up on combat and magic skill ups so that it's less of a grind, the way XP is less of a grind? An easy solution would be to make them come as quickly as they do in the 1-100 skill range. I noticed when I took up a new weapon when I was levelling jobs for job emotes that the skillups came very quickly.