My experience, which you mentioned, is party comp really makes a difference on those lower level dungeons when determining how much to pull. I find that pulls go faster if I enable the healer to DPS rather than spam heals from larger pulls if the DPS don't have AOE skills.

So for example, dragoon doesn't get its first AOE skill until level 40, ninja doesn't get theirs until level 38. Summoner gets bane at level 30 to start doing some AOE, but doesn't have Outburst till level 40. Comapre that to red mage that will have AOE right from Sastasha onward, and you just kind of need to know what your damage potential is in the ARR leveling dungeons to determine what you should do.