Xenosaga

Alright, so considering I've almost got Xenogears finished off, I'm really interested in picking this up. However, two things will greatly affect my decision.

1) Honestly, including the ridiculously long cinematics, how long does this game take to finish? I would estimate that I'll be somewhere around 80 hours before beating Xenogears and I honestly do not want to spend that much time on another RPG right now. If it's closer to 40 hours, however, I would be very tempted to pick it up.

2) Does this game do anything to remedy the most irritating aspects of the RPG genre? In other words, am I going to have to spend an extra 10 hours running around leveling my characters up? What about the random encounter rate? Am I going to be fending off baddies every five steps? On top of that, how does the random encounter system work? Can I see the enemies onscreen (and thus avoid them if I wish to) or is it Final Fantasy style with enemies attacking me from thin air? In other words, how mush effort was put into eliminating the annoying bullshit that plagues nearly every RPG known to man?

Any help I could get on this would be greatly appreciated.