Should I repeat the trip to meet Terra with four non-magic users?

After Terra had a lovely meetup with the Phantom Beast, followed by a lovely trip bouncing around the world everywhere, the other 6 playable characters agree to split up because you can't have parties larger than four players to go find her. For this I picked the Mechanic, the Samurai, the Monk and the Rune Knight. I figured that I should bring with me at least one magic user.

At the end of the trip, however, the group of four gains the ability to cast magic by touching each one piece of Magicite. This kind of a waste, because the Rune Knight already can do magic. Moreover, the fourth piece of Magicite came at a high price. Talk about unnecessary sacrifice.

Should I bother to replay this bit with four non-magic users? Should I actually make this a trip of three people, so that the unnecessary sacrifice doesn't happen to begin with?

Solution 1:

No. The new abilities will apply to any member of your party. Going forward, anyone on your team (including those you've yet to meet who will join in the future), will gain the ability to learn magic. To have them do so, simply have them equip a piece of Magicite - at the end of every battle from now on, in addition to Experience Points, you'll earn Magic Points, which go towards unlocking the spells associated with the particular Espers your party members have equipped.

To equip espers, open the menu, select Skills, one character, then pick Esper.

Each Esper has unique spells associated with it, so you'll want to move them around, and equip new ones as you acquire them in order to maximize the availability of important spells to all party members. Those characters with innate magic abilities (such as Celes), will also continue to learn specified new spells as they progress in levels. If you'd like to avoid redundancy here, you can consult a guide, but it's pretty hard to 'waste' MP in this manner, and by endgame, you'll have mastered all of the spells you need, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Solution 2:

Actually, you don't need to repeat the trip. The misunderstanding is that the Magicite stays in the location you found it, and you have to keep going back to it. That is false. You take the Magicite with you, for use in your party(s).

So there's no sacrifice to be made; once you find Terra/Tina, you will gain a few pieces of Magicite, and any members of your party that don't have MP, all of sudden, do! For those not currently in your party, they will have MP the next time you see them.

Note that this doesn't mean they'll have any spells; they won't. They'll just have MP, and you have to equip the Espers to characters in order to get them to learn spells, so they can actually USE that MP.