I hate the Junction system. It's the worst part of VIII. It made magic essentially useless, since all your most powerful spells are tied to your stats and your physical attacks wind up doing far more damage. It also replaced level grinding with an even more tedious activity: spell grinding. How many hours of gameplay do people waste drawing spells over and over and over to get 100 of a particular spell? You can't even try to enjoy the combat system, 'cause you spend the entire time spamming a single ability. In fact, except for Limit Breaks, you spend pretty much the entire game spamming one ability (two if you like GFs).

The Junction system was great for making characters with godly stats. Not as good as X's Sphere Grid, IMO, but still great for loading out stats and it let you overpower your elemental/status defenses to insane levels too. But for an actual magic casting system, it sucked. Splitting magic between multiple purposes has never worked out well. It didn't work in XII (Quickenings were used far more than most spells were, leading magic to be largely underutilized), and it didn't work in VIII. Magic is magic, stop trying to give it other uses.