Agreed OP.
It's a nice world. If you can handle the crazy AoE Boss fights, dungeons are in fact a great way to level. The thing with dungeons is, you get upwards of 1200 per trash mob because they are star mobs. One dungeon is often the same as doing 5 or 6 FATE spams for me. If I didn't loath the over use of area attacks on the boss mobs I'd be running dungeons all the time.