Speaking of anecdotal evidence, by the way

I see a lot of "The friends I introduce quit because of the story" n'd all that, but I'm both a friend that got introduced and I introduced a friend of mine on top. Both me and my friend absolutely love the story in the game and it's the thing that kept us playing.

That obviously means there's nothing wrong with the story and should keep it as-is, right?

Well, no, but that exact kind of reasoning is what I've mostly been seeing on the "cut down on it" side of things. The most reasonable arguments in this thread are the ones who actually point to specific sections of the story and say "cut those" instead of just blanket going "cut stuff" since the latter is pretty worthless.

Also, I don't think skipping the story is an invalid way to play. Not everyone's going to care and that's alright. Thing is, while I don't force my "you should watch the story" viewpoint on you by making cutscenes mandatory or something to that effect, neither should you be forcing the "who cares about the story" viewpoint by trying to hamstring the experience for others through making everything open to the player. It doesn't make a lick of sense for you to be in Norvandt without the Exarch yeeting your soul first, and making that area open to the player without that specific context does hamper the enjoyability to me. Landing in Lakeland and getting the 'ol "oldest joke in the book" treatment when you say night is meant to be dark is one hell of an entrance, and arriving at the Crystarium is a pretty grand occasion for it. The city is beautiful and grandiose and stands as a testament to the resilience of the people willing to build a new life. Just making it an area you have blanket access to without first going through all those steps just takes away from the experience and would reduce the immersion inside of the world.

One of the biggest problems facing WoW's story is that you're just some guy who was there. While this approach works for some, others feel slighted by how their character isn't really relevant to anything that happens, ever. FFXIV's mandatory story and high focus on your personal adventure is, whether you like it or not, a big part of the game's core design.

We do have endgame content, this is true, but we also have so much content before that which will always be relevant due to the duty roulette system. The game doesn't just want you to experience what's at the end, but also what's come before. If you'd rather not, this is also fine, it gives you that option. But stuff like the level 60 and 70 raids are still accessible, the queue times don't take forever and, most importantly, they have a story to tell that it wants you to experience for yourself.

Not all of the story content is good, but the MSQ is kind of the window in which the game frames itself. And, as others have said, there are plenty of options to make it go by much faster. Just skipping the cutscenes alone makes it a chain of quests that get you to level really quickly (and you can purposefully die in duties so you can select the "very easy" option after) and if you can't even be bothered to take the time to do that, a level skip is available that gets you up to speed on latest content. I don't really agree with the practice of monetizing this, but at the very least it signals to the average player that it is not what you are meant to do to experience the base game.

The biggest pushback seems to be from people who want to play alternate characters, and that seems somewhat reasonable on the surface, but you can do pretty much everything save the starting city story quests and a few branching paths on one character. The game doesn't really encourage alts at all, even if it allows them. That being said, I think if you had a character who completed the story up to a certain point, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be allowed to start a character that has reached an equal point of progression. Unfortunately, with level skips being a thing, there's very little chance of this happening.