Having just finished my grind from level 1 to the end of Heavensward (not the extra stuff patched in after 3.0, I'm still working on that) I feel like I feel like I have to agree with the OP.

A few of us in our guild were getting sick of the direction things were moving in SWTOR, so about 4 months ago we picked up FF. A couple of them were already max or near max level when we officially moved over and after the first two zones they instructed me that I should only be following the main story. So that's what I did, aside from dungeons and stuff I played exclusively the main story. The 1-50 story is great; it kept me entertained and interested. However, at hitting the post-50 quests leading up to Heavensward it was like hitting into a brick wall. The story was boring, not a lot was happening, most of the quests were filler, and you get next to no XP from it. It completely killed my excitement on the game and I actually could barely bring myself to log in. In fact, most of the time I didn't, for a little while most nights I found myself playing something else because anything else looked more fun. I had to force myself to in order to move forward and catch up with my friends.

Having those kind of filler quests makes sense when you're spacing it out over months of patches, but doing it all at once is an entertainment killer. All the people in this thread touting the story I think are completely missing the mark with their dismissal of the problem. Are you really going to hold up quests like "Hey great warrior of light, the most powerful person in the land, I forgot to mail out a letter. Can you please pick it up off my desk and put it in the mailbox for me? Thanks" as the pinnacle of story-based MMOs? Or, "hey I know we can talk over linkshell and all that but could you come to this town over here I want to talk to you. Great, now that you're here I'd like to go to other town on the other side of Eorzea to talk some more, meet you there. Well that was fun, let's go back to the original place now to finish our conversation." Whereas the ARR content and the 3.0 content kept me engaged and interested, the stuff in between had me wanting to drive nails through my eyes. It was an incredibly dull chore to get through. If they cut down those quests to just the important ones (probably 20% of the whole) then I could see that content as worth doing. But as it stands it serves as nothing more than a momentum killer for people trying to play through the game and hopefully get to max level.