The interface for joining an Exploratory voyage couldn't be designed any more clunky from the description.
* All participating players must be inside the free company workshop when undertaking exploratory missions.
Really? So, before you embark, everyone must gather in the workshop. If you are using PF, you must guide all the folks to your plot and into your workshop.

What purpose does any of this serve? What is wrong with just having a DF type of interface? Full party, off you go.

Looks like a tremendous amount of development effort has gone into the minion battles. Here's guessing that content will be popular for about a week or two after release and then be done only by a tiny portion of players (chocobo racing anyone?).