yay. I know I would have been pissed if I had lost ~40 hours of game time for no reason whatsoever. Good to know you can finally beat the game.
I, too, have a poor track record with finishing FF games. I think I got to the part where Cid is your primary character and then stopped. The only FF games I've actually finished are 1 and 13. Yeah, figure that one out. Though, to be fair, I would have beaten 8 if my crappy PC port hadn't crashed so often I got pissed and gave up.