I'm completely fine with Naoki Yoshida's update. I'm actually more pleased by the philosophical underpinnings of it to be honest.

Everyone plays games for their own reasons. Some play MMO's to play with their friends. Some play MMO's by themselves and enjoy the economic aspects of gameplay that a persistent world provides. Some play alone on an MMO to see what is possible. Some play with strangers exclusively in hopes of making new friends.

The motivations are as varied as there are unique individuals. With that being said, if someone wants to skip the majority of the story, not learn the intricacies of party play, and skip right to the end I see nothing wrong with this, even in an MMO. Hell, having a buddy strong enough and willing to do that for you shows that you have the minimum amount of social skills to warrant your existence in an MMO as opposed to a single player game. One of the major problems I've noticed so far is that people need to quickly judge others. This is so prevalent that the community demanded class/rank locked gear and their premise was that it wasn't good enough to check them to figure out what they were. Everyone knows that when you search for a party you do it by what they look like not what they're capable of and that alone has greatly added to their individuality by making everyone who plays the same class look exactly the same (sarcasm).

Regardless, level has never been a standard for skill. I've met people who have multiple level 50's and don't know how to do a Battle Regimen. Raptor grinds are not skill oriented but they're the easiest way to get SP. Most accessible RPG's didn't have a system that required skill to move forward but still rewarded players who did. The reward was being having early access to new areas or gloating rights. Sure, you could beat a Midgard Zolom at level 99. Hell, if you wanted to, you could beat it even earlier, but, could you beat the Midgard Zolom with all support characters KO'd without using materia below level 30? Power leveling isn't an issue. It's only an issue when people are doing it for profit, or are monopolizing areas and hopefully they'll have ways to combat that through the Special Task Force Unit.

It's like sprinting through Toto-Rak on Rank 50's. If people get enjoyment out of that, go for it. I for one prefer to experience the intricacies of the content. I like making my own gear from scratch from my own inventory. This requires me to level multiple craft and gathering classes. To some people it's a super chore and is needlessly time consuming. I prefer to know the final product was a creation of my own from start to finish. I relish that on a personal level, and I'm content with it. I also enjoy grouping in smaller parties and fighting "less than efficient" targets for SP. Often times I'll teach an unfamiliar person about battle regimens and once we get a rhythm going, I'll start creating goals like:

Let's see how long we can go without the battle music running out.
Let's see how many targets we can handle at one time.
Let's see what happens if the mage concentrates only on damage and doesn't heal.

... and so on until the restrictions get out of hand. You can't really do this in a pick up raptor grind though. It's not what people are there for in the first place. They're there for SP and SP only, and that's fine. I'll do that sometimes as well but I'll also do other things for fun and I don't need other people to admonish me in order to extract any enjoyment out of doing so.

I'm also not jealous of anyone who has all classes at cap. That's a neat achievement and all but it effectively tells me nothing meaningful about the game mechanics. I'm sure it's of great interest to those who have the same goal, and that's fine in my book. It's fun tweaking the system and capitalizing on advantages when they present themselves by min/maxing and careful stat tracking. It's even better when you pioneer a certain way and share it with the rest of the community. Totally understand that. It's very nice having access to all that content as well. It allows you to be very self sufficient, but it still doesn't say anything about your skill as a player and when I get there, I'll know it was through lot's of grinding but I'll personally be sure to spice things up along the way while having fun with others because that's how I prefer to spend my time.

Others don't.

To most of the people saying that the power leveling ruins the game, the truth is that it just plain doesn't. It only ruins your game by wilting the e-peen. If you're worried about a "tainted" endgame pool of players, it's going to exist regardless, especially as time goes on. You can't just /check someone and know their skill level, you can only determine what they are potentially capable of and that's always been the case.

tl;dr Be satiated by one's own accomplishments, not the digital respect of others.