Comparing the time it took to level in XI to this game is pretty flawed for numerous reasons, most of which were already posted here but there was an additional thing in XI that made leveling take even longer than just the imbalanced scaling of exp. in FFXI if you died, you lost 10% of your exp for your current level, unless this was mitigated by raise, which we not exactly easy to get back in the day. This made any death super punishing, as you lost exp progress with any death and could even De-level.