The "time-sink" of leveling, as everyone wants to call it, wasn't an effort to make FFXI more "difficult". It was a balancing tool. The longer it takes to level, the less amount of capped jobs a given player would have. It was pretty rare to see someone with more than 3 of the 20 before Abyssea, and especially before the past areas. Even the hardest of the hardcore didn't WANT to go through all that again, they needed to REALLY want that if they were going to. Maybe the casuals had to suck it up and put in some painful hours and maybe they would stop leveling after 1 job is up top, but its not that big a deal to only have 1 option when the vast majority have no more than 3.