I, for one, am glad SE's doing it this way. Why? Because there's story content in them thar hills!

But seriously, SE has locked story content behind the hardest difficulty events in the game. Now that the rewards are being outdone by something better, them making the story and the (what will be) mid-tier rewards available to players is only an increase in accessibility. This is something SE's doing that I've not seen many other games do and it's fantastic. It was one thing I was honestly upset about with EverQuest2 in that a lot of important story events happened through the raid content and I had come along to that game after the fact so couldn't really see it anymore. No worries here.