I don't consider myself Hardcore, but then I do spent my free time (which is occasionally considerable) online.
I have 2 classes to 50, both of which have completed their Relic (Bard and Warrior), I'm working on Scholar and have at least the titan weapon to level in to.
I have spent a fair bit of time with Gathering Classes, and understand Crafting (although in general the system doesn't appeal to me that much)
I feel that I have Amdapor, Ifrit HM, Garuda HM and Titan HM on farm

The only content I haven't touched yet is Binding Coil. I don't imagine it would take that long for me to learn the concepts unless I tried to go in with 7 other players who hadn't experienced it, hadn't read about it, and didn't want to go look things up and we tried to learn it from scratch. Although because of the way lock-out works we could try until we ran out of $$ to learn this way if we wanted, and then have them on farm (Turn 1-4) in a few weeks time even without it.

I didn't do a lot of Fate Grinding for any one of my classes, I prefered to go with dungeons / combat-leves just because FATEs make me go cross eyed only a slight bit slower than Castrum.

All that being said, yes I think the game is pretty small. I would have been happy if leveling took a little longer, and gear was... more important to being prepared for dungeon content than it currently is.