Friends of mine, new to the game, becoming discouraged by STORY QUESTS

[Niwashi]

they will most likely take out the storyline requirement to enter ishgard so people can go there and get the jobs.

Oh, they certainly won't be doing that. To enter Ishgard you need to do the full story that gets you into Ishgard. That's true regardless of whether you want to get there for the questline, dungeons, job unlocks, or just to gather from DoL nodes located there. If they were ever going to allow that, they would have done so from the start (though of course we'd be dealing with a different story in that case).

It's just that the next expansion will have its own separate story requirements that won't include the Ishgard part. (But of course, the next story also won't require unlocking Dark Knight or whichever you're interested in. You'll be able to skip the 2.x patch quests, but only if you're willing to forego everything that's gated behind them, which is all of HW except for the Au Ra race.)