I thought this was a pretty easy stage personally. Getting 75 alexandrites could be a bit of a pain, but it's even easier now than it used to be (due to the relative drop in price with allied seals) and aside from farming hunts there isn't really much of a way to grind this stage. The materia is pretty much irrelevant, assuming you're not completely broke. You can take a 1% DPS loss and spend 200k, or go all out spending millions and still not actually have BiS because you were ignoring the stats on all of your other gear anyway.

The Nexus stage took me longer and I found it to be much more annoying since you essentially couldn't do anything on a class other than the one you were building a weapon for.