I agree the board set-up could have been better, though I don't feel it's quite as bad except with some of the support abilities. The weapons, magic, and armor selection was mostly pretty good at giving it a more linear progression but then I also feel the game was meant to emulate older FFs where characters used multiple types of weapons.

My beef with the board is that it is too easy to complete and thus all your characters are either clones by the end game in terms of what they can do, or your sitting on 9999LP. It's kind of why I wished the International Version gets released because the License Board was actually suppose to be closer to that.