Ok, I've finished this tale rather hastily because I want to start over and do everything perfect. For anyone interested in seeing this through:
http://home.comcast.net/~f_amoroso/FinalFantasy-TheAxeManv0.2.fcm
So I take back what I said about healing. With some HP to spare I'm able to take on some fights in TOF, and let's face it, there's no way to get through there without mixing it up a few times. I finished in 1:17:07, which is over 13 minutes faster than the published version. With some more optimizations I believe at least a couple more minutes are possible. For reference, I have 13 fewer random encounters than Mookish, but throughout the entire way I end up fighting out 2 more battles than he does. He avoids all the wizards, but I have two wizards fights each in Earth cave and Ice cave. We each take on one fight in Sea shrine, but he takes on a whole gang of sahags while I pick on two ghosts. Going to Lefein, I only have two ZomBull fights to his three. In the TOF I have four fights to his five. Also, my enemy groups are all perfectly minimized and my fights are faster. I can take out at least a couple of these, maybe more. There should probably be only minor changes to the encounter list up through the Sea Shrine, but I may experiment with saving and loading after that, as long as I can find a good order in TOF. Also, I'm gonna try and pick up both the flame sword and wizard staff. Wizard staff solely for Blue D, flame sword mostly for Kraken, but it will get some other use too.
If I had to pick out the key planning point for a run on this game, it's definitely the Sea Shrine. Finding a good encounter sequence for it is a major bitch. TOF is worse on forced fights, but at that point there is a great equalizer in hand...