The story is great, but it blatantly gets in the way of the rest of the game

[Tychonius]

well it is.
If you can't be bothered to watch it in game. Skip it and youtube it.
Or unending journey it at your own time.

The point isn't that I can't be bothered to watch it, the point is if I play five days a week and I like to PvP on one of them, raid on the next, RP on the third, craft on the fourth and do story the fifth then all the other activities I enjoy are held up by the story, so I have to do story five days a week if I ever want no restrictions on the rest of the stuff. I don't want to pay 25 bucks to be allowed to to access expansion content I already paid for without hundreds of hours of frontloaded story and then replay it with NG+ either.