I actually agree, Quest Chaining is a horrendous system. People bitched about quests had long dialogues that "said nothing", but now that you can level at least early levels through talking to NPCs, I promise people will bitch about NPCs saying much of nothing and giving you exp and gil in exchange.

It'll be like Guildleves, how many people actually read the story tied to them? Not many, now take that and make NPCs say it..we're pretty much guaranteed to get a FF game that has no storyline just because people hate leveling lol. Hopefully they show some care for the main storyline. I read someone say quest chaining to level feels more FF compared to fighting trash mobs...

Well..in every final fantasy since the famicom days you:

-Got some story
-Fought monsters outside the first location you begin or inside of a dungeon type place
-Got more story in a new area
-Fought more monsters in said area
-Repeat
-Hit the overworld..oh look, more monsters to kill.
-New area, new monsters to kill with new story
-Repeat.

Once you hit end-game you were either in the proper place or overpowered depending on how many mobs you did or didn't fight along your way. Quest Chaining does nothing but veil monster slaying behind text people don't care for, exactly what Guildleves are now..they didn't have to move it to side-quests as well.

People are silly if they think they'll make elaborate storylines as a way of leveling people, you'll be sorely disappointed if you expect to get lore and character progress in the same quest. The current main storyline works for this because they further broke it down into the Umbral Era storyline which didn't progress your character but gave you a ton of backstory and "future" story and the main storyline was mostly used to boost your physical level, while grinding was done to boost your skill level, so it's a remnant of an old system no one liked.