They sort of dropped the ball with some of the job quests. I admit that there's not much you can do when you only have 5 quests in which to tell a story.
To be fair, the PLD and WAR 30-50 quests had a goal in sight. What made the DRK 30-50 questline so memorable to people was the sort-of-surprise at the end.For Pld, I liked the characters for the GLA quests more than the ones for the Pld quest. For War's, the job quests were far more interesting than the class quests. Drk doesn't really have class quests, but the sub 50 quests were WAY better than the post 50 ones.
I'll agree that PLD's quest was a bit on the bland side. WAR at least had reasonably high stakes, but again you knew what you were going to face.
I think the problem was the lack of risk in the 50-60 questline. Risk and conflict are what make a story interesting (not to say a story should have risk and conflict all the time, as that would devalue everything), and the one assumed risk by the player was taken away and replaced by something else.For the Pld quests, specifically, the post 50 quests do have some intrigue. There's a pretty interesting streak of lore in there, but you have to really read between the lines to get at it.