Main Scenario Restriction Bloodstorm - Very Very Bad idea.

[Niwashi]

The main problem with it all is just there's SOOO much backtracking and menial tasks between the really important stuff.

You're asking SE to streamline away the story. The story isn't just the highlight bits. It's also about how you get to those highlight bits. Those other quests (or most of them anyway) can't be moved off to sidequests, because they wouldn't make sense or serve their purpose there.

It's an essential part of the design (of most RPGs, certainly all FFs) that you're going to need stuff from NPCs who will only help you if you do or get something they need. Objectives are chained together so that in order to accomplish objective A you'll need an item you can get through objective B, but to reach the area for that you'll need to do objective C, and so on, all so that you can eventually put those together into achieving the main objective you started with.

If those quests didn't gate the following part you're trying to reach, there'd be no point in them. They exist in order to make it take the effort of doing them in order to get where you want. (They even repeatedly joke about the effect in-game during the long lead up to the first Titan trial. That whole section would be completely ruined if they shortened it any.)

Did SE overdo it a bit in the 2.1 - 2.55 patches? I don't know. Some people seem to think so. But even if SE removed or shortened a quest or two, it wouldn't shorten the process enough to make much difference to the time it takes to go through them, and any more than that could end up butchering the storyline.

[MistakeNot]

Y
If those quests didn't gate the following part you're trying to reach, there'd be no point in them. They exist in order to make it take the effort of doing them in order to get where you want. (They even repeatedly joke about the effect in-game during the long lead up to the first Titan trial. That whole section would be completely ruined if they shortened it any.)

I don't know about "completely ruined". I think "completely less annoying" would be more accurate.

[LineageRazor]

I don't know about "completely ruined". I think "completely less annoying" would be more accurate.

Actually, "annoyance" is, in a fashion, part of the intent of that series of quests. It's the old secret test trope, where the hero is made to do a number of seemingly irrelevant tasks, only to learn later that they all had a hidden purpose. In this case, the folks responsible for putting Titan down before are testing the Warrior of Light to make sure they have what it takes to bring down Titan before they are willing to assist the hero in reaching the Primal, believing (possibly rightly) that sending a hero without the chops to get the job done would be akin to murdering the poor sap.

Many heroes, put through secret tests of this sort, DO become irritable and annoyed (think Daniel-san from the original Karate Kid movie, who eventually lost his patience with Mr. Miyagi making him do all those chores - only to learn that the repetitive motions were intended to prepare his body for the karate moves he was to learn). So if you did, as well, you're playing right into the trope, as intended!

I won't say that the Titan questline was the most graceful way I've ever seen this trope handled (ARR's storyline was clumsy in many ways, not just here), but the various tasks you were sent on for that quest were not meaningless. They had a storytelling purpose, and simply removing them would defeat that purpose.