The whole business about world maps seems utterly ridiculous to me-- in all the games I played that had them, VI-X (X did have one, by the way, for those of you who missed that part of the game where you climb into Cid's airship and, if you want, explore all of Spira), it added absolutely nothing to the game. Even though it gave a sense of wandering the land wild and free, the locations were still sparse, you still had to follow a set pattern of missions to unlock most of them, and every few steps you had to stop and engage in tedious battle. To me, this never really added anything extra to the element of exploration involved in the games. The only difference is that you could see the places in your journey ahead of time rather than being led to them chronologically (which, to me, makes more sense-- if you're on a mission to save a character, for instance, how realistic is it that the group goes to play a chocobo side-quest game instead?).

I think you're all bitching about an element of the games that really doesn't make them what they are-- play FFXII first and see what the changes do to the experience before you start crying about how the series is ruined.