I'm digging it a lot, still trying to nail down where I want to start/what I want to do first. Definitely discovered that doing the leves is pretty much how you level the gathering skills/tradeskills with reasonable speed if you are out of discoveries for the current tier available to you. Question though: was the Limsa > Ul'Dah ferry disabled or something or is it just a waiting game til 15 (lawlz one day) before you can pick up the smithing skills to make better use of mining? Not that it is an issue, but that was something that half a dozen+ people asked me and was one of the areas I had no idea about.
Not sure what people mean about Aero not being worth the cast for cnj. Unless I outlevel a mob by a couple of levels, it manages to get through most of it's tic every time when I cast it after my first stone I cast. Seems to do decent enough damage so that it'd save me a cast or two of stone and while it may not be the optimal mana conserving strat it certainly speeds things up a bit. (I tend to fight shit above my level running around doing the Hunter's log quite often)
And yeah, the world looked a bit bigger than the 4-5 zones around each city. Specifically, there's a road going north off the map from North Shroud near Gridania that has no zone linking to it, so I'm assuming there's another full sized map area (4-5 more zones at least, probably more) north of that. Then there's a couple of spots on the world map itself that contain what look like outpost/cities of some sort, so my assumption would be lots more left to be implemented.