You're correct that it's more on the rails than what we are used to, and more aptly put, less room to make mistakes.

I think in some sense, allowing new players to make lots of mistakes is kind of counterproductive. I know we love to put our Dust Hipster Hats on and talk about how it needs to be ultra hardcore because we went through that and that's how it should be.

But to someone who is new, particularly a broad audience, punishing people for making long term choices that they have no means of actually understanding isn't good game design. Like we joke about it now, but I've talked to new players who spent a ton of SP on Dropsuit Operation IV and V because they were under the impression that it would unlock new suits.

Now obviously that skill had issues, but that player felt absolutely ****** because he had made a long term irreversible mistake at a time when that SP could have really been spent on something he needed early on. Was it his fault that he didn't read every item description and guide to realize he was wasting his SP? Sure, but is it really reasonable to demand that players be extremely well versed in a game they just started playing? Absolutely not.

Now the direction I see the dev team pushing is more so "There is less room to make mistakes in the long term skill training stage...however we are trying to give players as many short term choices (such as fitting) as possible, which means plenty of room for mistakes. The difference being is that a stupid fit screws you for one battle, a stupid choice leveling a skill to V could screw you for weeks. Choice should matter, but the act of realizing you screwed up and trying to figure out how to fix it next time is fun...grinding sp to fix a bad skill choice, not so much.