I like 12, I've thrown over 100 hrs on the Vanilla version, but it has many problems, I'm of the opinion that Zodiac Age actually made some things worse, while trying fixing others. Mainly killing the Difficulty of Vanilla, and Vanilla didn't give a shit about character growth and stats, Fran has the shittiest stats out of all the series of FF games probably lol.
I wish Square would release Development Toolkits for the modders to go nuts on these games, the shit that you could do on 12 with just a map editor. 12 showed the most potential out of the post PS1 era. I played the Stuggle for Freedom mod for a while and it was pretty enjoyable, it kinda went retard when you reach the Salikawood or Golmore Jungle, can't remember, so i dropped it there.
I'm actually ok with the license board, I would try to find a way to combine it with the Job System of FFT. The Zodiac Job System attempted that, But it's doesn't felt satisfying, no class felt complete. The skills were designed to work with the entire board. They should've reworked some of the skills and the rebalance others for it to make more sense. They probably dropped the difficulty on these ZJS versions to compensate for that.