I didn't really mind it a lot since it game you room to explore the job system, but they should have changed a few things. Chapter 5's side-quests were pointless, since they barely changed compared to the original quests. That way, it only set a bad precedent for the things to come.
In chapter 6 things started to get interesting again, since a lot of quests had quite a bunch of interesting new content, which portrayed the villains further. In particular, you saw that most of the villains had pretty good reasons for their actions and that your party judged wrong on a lot of things. Same is true for chapter 7, which gets even more interesting since you start to fight against the bosses in groups.
Chapter 8 is a low point again. After beating everything three times, you don't want to repeat it a fourth time. It's especially annoying since a lot of side quests are pretty hard and, yet again, there's not a lot of new story content. The truth about chapter 8 is that it's quests are supposed to be post-game content -- to show that, the developers should have hidden them until you actually beat the boss. It's rather frustrating, since the last bunch of boss fights in chapter 8 are some of the hardest fights in the game, but when you are in the mood "to finally get over with it", you won't enjoy the challenge. Stupid design decision, really.
In short, they should have cut chapter 5 completely and they shouldn't unlock chapter 8's sidequest until you've beaten the game. That way it would have been much more enjoyable, imo.
I understand why the repeated the circle so often, and they definitely managed to nail the feeling of routinely awakening the same crystals over and over again (while being attacked by monsters that aren't even frightening anymore), but a RPG is not a Visual Novel. What works in something like Steins;Gate becomes too time consuming in an RPG. I do hope that Hayashi will also write Bravely Second and that he learned from his experience with Bravely Default, though. I think the story had a lot of potential, a lot of great subtones, makes great use of foreshadowing and the world is more complex than it seems at first -- but you also realize that the author has not much experience writing RPGs, yet.