Honestly, I don't run as my jobs because of the very thing you've mentioned. Does that mean I suck? No, job is just a special feature that you can freely use as the attached class. As for linear... again, do you know what that means? XIII was the 'so linear it makes rulers look like warped sticks' game, where you didn't have subquests until Gran Pulse and once you left Gran Pulse you never saw another subquest ever again. XIV is full of quests, some just need to be unlocked through progression in the main story, but once you did they were everywhere. The reason the main story progresses as it does is because it's the main story. One story connecting everything in the game. It was like this in XI, the story quests each feeding into the next story quest. Not sure what you were expecting.