The world feels too small.

[ElHeggunte]

Oh, you mean just like what they did with the mythology tome cap~

I think the tome cap is padding too, but that's not what this topic is about. Leveling is fine, questing is fine, etc. Even traveling and exploration are in and of themselves fine. However, being forced to do unnecessary amounts of travel through unnecessarily large zones so that I can go level or quest is not. When I say "unnecessarily large" I mean zones that are enormous, but otherwise don't serve any purpose to the game other than to be a hub between other areas and make me take longer to go from point A to point B.

NMs, HNMS, leveling spots, quests, bcnms, etc. There were plenty of reasons to explore the beautiful world of Vana diel!

Yes, but those were still centralized to certain zones and you didn't exactly "explore", you took the shortest route you could to get there. Outside of those areas most of the other zones were still largely empty and unused unless you had to pass through them to reach a place you did care about meaning their size was irrelevant save for the larger zones taking longer for you to traverse. The same thing applies here. Even if the zones were bigger, it's still unlikely that they would be used enough to justify the size and the amount of time it would take you to get across them.

I'm only speaking for myself here, but...

That's fine, but once you've fully explored a zone, what then? That's my point. SE could make the zones five times as big as they are now and it largely would make no difference since once you've explored a zone one time there's no reason to go back and do it all over again. I enjoy exploration myself, but I want to do it on my own terms. Being forced to take the scenic route every single time you step outside would grow old very fast and would just be a timesink. After I'm satisfied that I've explored a zone enough, I enjoy the option to skip to the "good parts" as it were.