I haven't seen all that much of Chase's own Columbia shorts, but MANY SAPPY RETURNS was filmed in spring of 1938, the same time he was working on FFS, and it's good in its own right. The highlights for me were (1) Charley thinking he's been given the taxi he's driving by his girlfriend's father (the mistakenly identified escaped loony) and driving around taunting Fred Kelsey, the dispatcher at the cab co. he works for, and (2) Charley and the lunatic going to a posh restaurant - the lunatic orders something under a covered dish, and when it gets to their table, it's a big box of saltines - which Charley and the lunatic then stuff into their mouths, all the while trying to keep up polite dinner conversation. This leads to cracker spit-takes. None of this is particularly original - it's what Chase can do with the material that counts.
FFS seems to me a case where Chase just couldn't get all the disparate material to jell, and wasn't too concerned. He was getting paid by the week, not the hour. I have the sense that by this point in his career Chase was less interested in refining character (in both his films and others') than in just getting the working day done. His energies were limited (although he was still a comparatively young man of 44 at the time we're talking about) and I think he needed to conserve what creative and physical energy he had. He could turn out some really great directorial efforts (such as TASSELS IN THE AIR, maybe because he based the film on one of his own), but he could just as easily at the time "phone in" his directorial responsibilities (e.g. Andy Clyde's very dull THE OLD RAID MULE). As with Clyde Bruckman, when Chase was reworking material he'd done earlier, he seemed capable of a fine job, pacing and re-inventing the material, but when given material less interesting to him personally, he seemed to just rush through in order to get to the next project, or to husband his energy for something more worthwhile from a creative standpoint. Chase had some long-standing ulcers, plus incipient heart problems, and no doubt those contributed to his rushing shooting at times.
His situation in 1939-40 reminds me of Curly's in 1946 - an overtired man pushed (or pushing himself) too hard for a variety of factors, the main one in Chase's being that he'd been unemployed almost a year from mid-1936 to early 1937 and didn't want to lose what was a very viable work situation, by admitting he was ill at times.
I don't think the shooting schedules at Columbia were too restrictive to Chase - most of his post-1931 Roach work was filmed in 4 or 5 shooting days.