Frankly, it takes a mammoth amount of time to get from 30-75 on BLM solo, made even more time demanding by the fact that you can't exactly fill your wallet very well at such low levels to gear yourself and make the progress. Even if you were to buy some gil so you could just XP and not farm, you could expect it to take 74 hours of solid XPing (at a highly skilled rate of 10k xp/hr) to get that 30-75.
Factor in the XP loss and time delay from deaths, travel times, and misc quests to gear yourself along the way, and you are looking at one hundred plus hours. In fact, I'd wager that I myself could not do it in under 200 hours on a fresh, unassisted account. And, not to brag, but I could make good work of a speed run.
So ask yourself, do you want to spend 200+ game hours on an exercise in futility, or do you want to get to relevant content in a day or three? I'd Abyssea it in a heartbeat. Then all you have to do is learn how to play the job and skill it up. A great time to do that is while acquainting yourself with TotM staves, which are nigh requisite to being outstanding.
P.S. Once you get into Abyssea, you have the solid source of income that is NPC or AHing anything and everything you can get your hands on. Augmented items out of Gold Pyxides, Cruor armor, Dom Ops augmented weapon, Battle Trophy augmented armor, and pop items all fetch a moderate price that can more than fund your character's basic to mid range gear needs. I would go as far as to say that if I absolutely had to, I could make my character's living off of cashing in on Abyssea by-products, and would not need to stoop to buying gil just to get the capitol necessary to keep FFXI a game rather than a job.
Edited, Jul 5th 2011 10:58am by tertoonetwothreefour
____________________________
There are two kinds of people in FFXI, those doing the laughing and those who don't know what's funny.