Class and Job Quests have always done this. The conjurer quests teach you about Cure, the Astrologian quests teach you about cards and there are many jobs that require you to attack things with certain attacks. All the Heavensward job quests tried to explain the new abilities in the lore and designed the quest around the ability, so that it makes sense why you learn that ability from it. Eventually, SE became tired of the effort required to design story around abilities, especially with the 20 jobs we have now and how most people put off alt job quests until max level anyway.

Many of the abilities that you learn in these quests have changed a lot over the years or even been removed, requiring a quest change. SE doesn't want to keep updating old content because it is important to focus on the new content which makes players resubscribe. And that is why they can't make Hall of the Novice more sophisticated.

I do want to point out that the role quests involve using your abilities though. I had to actually heal on a healer and the NPCs nearly died if I just tried to DPS like in dungeons, I had to actually use interrupt on a tank, I had to actually do mechanics on a DPS instead of falling asleep.

People have always been clueless in PvP. Nothing is going to make them not clueless unless it doesn't have objectives. Killing the enemy is an obvious task. Objectives usually are not obvious enough.