A hindrace?
Here's a scenario;
I start a new game on FFTA, and on the first mission - Picking herbs - I Leave one goblin alive (to minimise damage) and just spam First Aid until Marche is level 50, I then put the poor goblin out his misery. After the battle I dismiss all my level 3-5 characters and complete some more missions (with my super-duper level 50 character that my enemies can hit for a nice 1 damage if they're lucky) and oh look! It's a Character wanting to join my clan! And wow! He's level 25 this sure beats having my level 3-5s (Level 25 because of Montblanc not being able to spam anything (except items maybe) resulting in him being very insignificant to Marche in levels)
But you may argue that you wont be able to sufficiantly level these characters until the later stages of the game, and that makes a very good point but one thing's for sure; having level 25 characters is certainly not a hindrace.
And one more thing; I never had a problem with any of the characters that were trained as one specific job - in fact I found them to be better, What good is a Fighter if you trained it for levels as a Black Mage? My point being that any character trained as one job and nothing else is better at doing it's own job (e.g Defender = Defence, White mage = Magic or Sage = Attack, magic and a huge MP figure). That being said sometimes it is definatly better that you mix jobs so that it gains some other stats (e.g Paladin/White mage combination you may want to raise the Paladin as a White mage so that it gains some extra MP).
I'm done. :mog: