Get a friend or some mercenary to power level to 40 like said before.

Don't worry about the skills until you start doing partys, the learning curve on this game is like one hour of reading the skills you have and testing it... not like other games like XI that you could have like 100 skills or magics.

Anyway, if you find lvling boring you ill find terrible the end game, right now is all about repeating the same content like 100 times just to get what you want... Really don't worth the time imo. The frustation you will get of as example doing like 50 runs of ifrit on a week and get a few totems at least and nothing more is kinda a overkill to me.

If i where you ill wait to 2.0 to join. The only thing you will miss is the seven era quests that are just silly quest that don't really matter...

BTW, i stop playing like in mid April and start playing TERA online. Having a FFXIV standards looking now on tera is like comparing FF Mystic Quest to a later one.

INB4 flame on me, i really like this game, the battle system and the fights, but i don't like how is implemented right now. I feel like im wasting my time for nothing, all most all primals drops are worthless except the ifrit ones and the darklight equipments are really time consuming to get them, and even if you have a full set you will still be able to do the same as you did with your basic equipment. There is not much endgame content in fact, is just a tedious lurking for worthless equip...

If we have some kind of pvp or massive NM that need the best equip to be able to think of defeating it then it will have some kind of sense going throw all that work for the equip.