I'm even failing to see how this is an exploit. Here's how it breaks down:

1. Make a party, fight Garuda. Use 15 minutes ability, win or lose.

2. Go to Dragonhead leve camp, pop a faction leve, tehen abandon it. IT still costs the person who used the faction leve a leve allowance to do this.

3. 15 minutes timer, that was used in Garuda battle is reset before you even enter the Garuda battle.

Therefore, all it does is to reset your job abilitys timer outside of battle. It's not used in battle, hell it can't even be used in battle. This isn't the sort of thing that can be used 'at any time'. Especially keeping in mind when you change classes/jobs, your timers are reset. (and most people do this to get EXP on other classes, mainly crafting claseses after winning Garuda).

People that are calling this an exploit and even going so far as calling this a cheat need to get over themselves. I fail to see how this is a huge issue:

It doesn't break any game balance.

It doesn't earn anyone any free loots unfairly.

It doesn't earn anyone any free exp or gil unfairly.

It doesn't give anyone any unfair advantage. (Remember ANYONE can do this).

All it does is to eliminate the unnecessary wait time needed to prepare for Garuda by having the 15 minutes timer immediately available instead of waiting an extra 15 minutes just to wait for the timer to count down.

What IS an exploit? Remember the time when you could indefinitely kill mobs under necrologos leve and gain yourself tons of EXP?

Or how about we look at FFXI, where everyone abused a game glitch that allows people to 'triple' duplicate the game loot from Salvage or Nyzul or Assaults.

Or how about someone abused a game glitch where a certain item could be sold for 2 million gil a piece to an NPC.

Those were blatant exploits, and in the latter two, people were banned for this.

If anything, by all rights, this "exploit" is worse than the power leveling Exploit that Yoshi-P, himself, clearly had no problem with.