Well its a bit late now but I would put few points forward to the OP.

Firstly, part of insisting the 2.55 is about establishing structure for the narrative so new people who do want to follow the story don't get lost. Most players who even like the story would likely skip straight to HW and be completely lost cause the HW story requires you to know what happened in the patches to make sense.

Secondly, while the content is 'old', its still content of the same basic quality and it will provide you with gear to handle the things you will face in HW. Go in with base 2.0 gear and you would get rekt in the new zones.

Thirdly, tied to the second point, much of the content in HW is very much similar in flow to 2.0 and the patch content so if your not enjoying it your probably not going to get much out of going through the HW story and there is a lot more of it than the patch story. Its kind of like going out for a meal and then skipping straight to the desert cause it was latest part of the meal. This is understandable as it is the default mindset in many MMOs but it means your skipping the bulk of the game.

Finally, Your friends can do all the non-instanced story content with you prior to HW. If they aren't interested in doing that with you then they probably aren't likely to be doing much with you to 60 anyway which will take you a lot longer than 9 hours to get to anyway.

Since you asked for the thread to be deleted Im guessing you probably wont read this but my main point will be this. In any game with a playerbase with varying tastes alike MMOs have there is always going to be some give and take. FF14 is a bit unusual in that it is more accommodating that story focused players than many MMOs.