Frankly if you got only half a level after 3 hours of partying in XI, something was grossly wrong. Even at a suboptimal side camp in a crowded zone three hours would get you at least one or two levels, more if it was during ToAU or WotG. That aside, while you did have to complete chunks of story to access endgame in XI, the quest levels were so spread out and some were even put in popular leveling regions that you leveled into the next quest or were already there in the zone to run to once you had an exp buffer. And the storylines themselves were divided to be standalone stories with their own level caps and side content (yes there was stuff to do at 30 50 60 70) that you could pick and choose to focus on depending on what content you wanted to get access to. And a lot of the repeatable endgame content wasn't just Sea and Sky but other modes that only required token progress in some stories.

That being said, I have no problem with XIV's story structure and don't feel it's "forced" but that's probably due to people having different mindsets and expectations of what they feel is worth doing and focusing on. Should XIV change? Big Maybe, but I hope not.