How did your friends feel about it?

Man, I hope i can finish mine as well, but at our pace... the characters are leveling up once every year orz

Also, congratulations!

Well, I'm not sure. I tried to keep it entertaining but we had long periods of hiatus between gaming sessions in the last part, and that takes away a lot of the continuum in the story so...
I also had some problem on the levelling, but I believe that's also an in-built problem of the D&D 3.0/3.5 edition, whereas if the only given experience is that of combats, since combat usually takes quite some time (expecially if there are many characters, between PCs and NPCs), often a whole session may pass in a single combat, therefore a lot of sessions may be needed for a single level.
Theoretically this could be counterbalanced by "interpretation-exp" however that depends also on the game style you use as well as the kind of paly your players are most confortable with.
Lenghty comment is lenghty!

Mmm... That's a nice way to share exp in my opinion! I'll consider it for our next session!

Also, my way to hook a story is pretty bad, so I'm thinking on doing a couple of sessions with the Call of Cthulhu before retaking Pathfinder.

A D&D campaign that lasted that long? Congrats on holding a group together for so long. That's just plain amazing.

Well, me and my players live quite close to each other and we didn't play *just* D&D during the duration of this campaign so... anyways we had new additions and people who left (amongst which there's one whose charater I believed has been trapped inside a tower for the last... 7-8 years? something like that) but, somehow, we kept on playing

That's the best way to do it. I've been trying to maintain a group for a while, but they keep falling apart, mostly because we just live too far apart to keep meeting with any regularity. Know you have my envy and my admiration for holding it together that long.

You did pretty good to go that long! Sadly the group that I had started with a couple of years ago went for 6 months before it fell apart due to personality clashes. That and the GM getting tired of people whining about stupid crap all the time was the reason why we eventually gave it all up.

Oh, the whining, I'm quite familiar with that. I've almost never known a gruop without, at least, a little whining, you just have to roll with it, sometimes. Mastering is complex, but also very rewarding at times, and not all the whining is bad, sometimes it can be helpful!