Blue Mage is a masterpiece of game design.

[Burningskull]

Because that's not "hunting for spells", it's "mandatory acquisition of skills in a specific order".
First, you wouldn't have to seek where to learn the spell (Which is saddly, what everyone is doing because they rushed to see the datamine instead of discovering by themselves)
Second, you wouldn't have to think of a way to learn some abilities sooner than what's expected, to give an edge.
Third, you wouldn't have to strategically chose your spells to deal with a specific situation (Well, apparently, this one is not done very well, but still, that's the intent)

So, basically, you'd work the same as every other, with the additionnal burden of having RNG to determine if your quest is successful. And if you remove RNG, it's even less hunting for spells...

Also I'm dying for some sort of... order for my spells. So far all I got is Bristle > Off-Guard > Song of Torment then is spam Glower or Ram's Voice, maybe popping peculiar light before I spam my 2 primal abilities since Ifrit and Garuda , Shiva and Levi, share a cooldown so I only get 2 primal abilities. There's no reason to use any of my other spells. No reason to use Plaincraker, no reason to use flamethrower, no reason to use Ram's Voice cause I can do more damage and keep the enemy in place by just spaming Rame's voice.
Well, from what they said, without that collectathon aspect, we simply wouldn't have Blue Mage...at all. So they didn't sacrifice anything.

Of course everyone went and looked up where to get spells. No one, unless you're insane, want's to just look in the book, see this spell is gotten from West Thanalan, and goes to West Thanalan and kills one of every mob hoping it's the right one for their spell. Especially when you have to see the mob use the ability. You would be sitting there waiting for every mob to cast every one of their spells then killing it to see if it was the mob that dropped your spell. On top of that the fact that spell acquisition is random you wouldn't even know if the mob you were fighting was the wrong mob or you were just unlucky. They might as well have put every location you can learn the spell from in the Book and what mob dropped it to save people the 10 min it took to look it up online.