I finally finished this a few days ago and loved it. In SC I was surprised to find myself come around on a lot of things that didn't thrill me in FC: the structure, some of the characters, the battle system... When I first heard 3rd was pretty much a dungeon crawler I lost most interest in it, but now I look forward to eventually playing it, someday.
I feel like SC succeeds at something that other Tales-ish JRPGs try and fail to do. Not to rag on Tales games too much, but there I feel like the protagonists there just seem like one of each personality type, who all stick together because they all happen to be "good-guys". In Trails I think the protagonists believably care for each other.
One odd thing that I was surprised I hadn't seen mentioned here - after beating the game I went back and read the XSEED translation blogs for some extra context, and noticed that some of the changes they mentioned putting in the PC version aren't actually there. They mentioned changing Hamel to Hemel, and how "Haru" in Gambler Jack really should've been "Halle". As of a few days ago, in the PC version they are still Hamel and Haru.