I'm on like chapter 19 now. I think I kinda messed up my character leveling because hardly any of them are anywhere near being able to use the 'master' classes, mostly because most of them are cavalry classes and I haven't been leveling up lance or riding skills for most characters, so getting them up to rank A at this point seems like an insurmountable task, and that has kinda dulled my enthusiasm.
Also, I recently realized that I went through an entire playthrough and a half without understanding how to break monsters' armor. I didn't realize that you had to break each tile of the monster separately. So I was just not doing that. Every once in a while it would happen by accident and I'd get some ore and be like "how did I do that," but usually I was just able to defeat the monster with the armor still on. Oops