Deliver bag of crap, delouse sheep, break rocks. Erm.

[Niwashi]

Sometimes I wish we could go back in time where players didn't need to be lead around a map following quest markers.
...... than be sent on petty errands by NPCs.

It's not the quests or "petty errands" that have changed. It's the map markers and other instrumentation that have overly simplified questing in recent games as opposed to older ones. Quests have always been the focus of RPGs, but it used to be that the NPC giving you the quest explained what they wanted (usually a pretty detailed description, sometimes not), and you had to figure out from that how to find what they need and how to go about providing it or doing it. Now our quest journal will bring up a map that points out exactly where to go at each step, and the tracker keeps the current objectives listed onscreen at all times. It's all those pointers along the way that trivialize these quests, not the fact that we keep running errands.