Having to slog through lvl 50 quests is tedious

[Skivvy]

Unless you do Raphsody. Then you have to do them. After all you can't do Raphsody's Sky stuff if you don't have access to sky. You also couldn't do fun things in Sky when it was a busy thing unless you progressed far enough to again gain access Sky. Same with Sea or to be able to get to fight some of SoA's more fun bosses. Also had to unlock limbus just so you can up grade some of the best gear so you could do/enjoy the latest content. XI had just as many lockouts. Sure you didnt have to finish all or any of CoP to enter into ToA stuff because they treated each expansion as it's own thing until you run into roadblocks that make some people go how is that unlock needed for this? Then you had to go and backtrack.

Of course there are requirements, and some items were linked to other zones/content being unlocked. However, XI gives you the choice to unlock things as you want. If you wanted to do focus on Sky, you could go straight to those missions and unlock it while mostly ignoring the other expansions. Usually the zones/content were unlocked pretty early on in the storyline. I think Limbus required you to be on the final chapter of CoP, but this was far more rare. Rhapsodies doesn't require full completion of any story line - but yes, you have to have access to a couple of areas. This is vastly different than forcing hundreds of quests to get into relevant end-game content.

XIV does not let you pick and choose your path. If you only want to do SB content, you must complete ARR and Heavensward and then you can finally begin your journey. That is off-putting to a lot of people :X