Everquest Next is looking to be by far the best MMORPG on the market and is open world without pretty much any instances, dangerous world and horizontal progression. I doubt games will ever go back to being as time consuming as they used to be, but it doesn't look like it will go as far as ARR has done either which will satisfy many of the people who liked the epic feeling. Especially since they are planning to have different types of servers where one might actually cater to the more old school players instead of trying to fit everyone into the same mishmash of ideas.