Not really, it adds specific items at each level unlocked. The limiting factor is that you can't afford to buy them, so there's little point in, say, unlocking all the armors while you're still in Ch. 2. Weapons are a bit different, and I would advise unlocking at least up to level 7 by the beginning of Ch. 3. That's the spear, and it's fairly affordable considering how much more powerful it is than the basic Valkyrie Spear. The last three normal items are an axe, a katana, and a sword, none of which are terribly useful until later, and they're really expensive. The final item is a knife; could be useful, but I'm assuming it's way out of my price range.
My advice would be armor 6, weapons 7, accessories 7, special moves 3, trader 10, combat item 7-10 (because the last two give you the items for free periodically, even if you can't afford to buy the stuff). After that, unlock special move parts, go back and get the second tier of moves (7), etc. I'm still only in Ch. 3 and my Norende is practically done except for the Level 11 items. Haven't really been abusing sleep mode excessively, but I did have 20 settlers going into the game from my demo savefile.
Ranger and Valkyrie are where it starts to get really interesting imo. Hopefully you leveled up Spell Fencer for them earlier, as it's probably the strongest secondary for them both. I recommend not ignoring Freelancer either; the abilities are handy for dungeons, especially the one that lets you ignore poison water, traps, etc. and it should be the first job you grind past the 3500 JP wall because the support ability that unlocks gives you +20% JP.
Main reason I run with +100% in the overworld is so that I can turn it to 0% or -100% if I start to get irritated by constant battles inside a dungeon and trying to explore the whole map for chests. I remember at one point I kept running into trash fights with dragons that had super high p.def and I just said nope and shut that shit off entirely.
