Final Fantasy games are very storycentric, so to be honest you pretty much have to expect a lot of text for the story.

Agree with the GCD that when you are starting out it does seem slow, but when you get more and more skills plus skills that can weaved between the GCDs then add on having to dodge mechanics then it becomes perfectly fine.

But welcome to Eorzea and stick with it

Also not all servers are plagued by continuos gil speller spam, on Odin it's pretty rare. But I wouldn't be surprised if gil sellers target more the players under a certain level. not 100% on that tho.