Yea like I said in LS chat last night, FF14 is basically built around Skill party v2.0, It's a horrible horrible idea because skill parties in FF11 was one of the worse things looking back for me (granted I was a whitemage most of the time), anyways, how SE think this is a good idea is beyond me.
Last night me Maki and Kessah were grinding (I say grinding I mean trying to) on fat dodos and the sp gains were all over the place.
I was getting about 350-500 during battle but when the battle ended I would recieve a big fat 0, other times I would be getting 400 sp and the other 2 would be getting 0-40.
It's really demoralizing to get 0 at the end of the fight, we also figured that having lower level party members makes the system even worse because its as if they start leeching the sp (whether there is some equalizing shit going on in the battle system is anyones guess)
Needless to say we couldn't figure out how the system worked and it isn't based on damage done or sp gained during battle because as I said above this isn't the case.
Edit:- I forgot to mention at rank 18+ the XP needed starts to become quite a grind, I can't imagine how bad 49-50 is going to feel.
Right now I'm starting to think the grind will be worse than 11.