While I'm certainly not disagreeing with you, this particular system is made long (and boring) I think in an attempt to make players focus on a single job (as it pertains to their relic anyway). I would absolutely not recommend trying to do the full quest chain on multiple jobs unless you have a ton of free time and patience. The atma gathering portion can be extraordinarily long (or short if very lucky) and the next few legs aren't any shorter (and can't be made shorter through luck -- except perhaps Novus but you'd require an absurd amount of luck).

Since you just got back, you are probably unaware that roughly everyone hates gathering atma. This is likely the 500th thread calling for them to rethink/ reconfigure/ tweak this portion of the quest and they mostly don't comment on it at all.