I had the exact same experience with the Culinarian questline (and Pulmia and Prudentia were delightful - they're still in the Bismark, but that's it. /sadface). The 1.0 CUL quests were fantastic. The ARR version were so bad that I forgot to do the last few until long after I had hit 50.

It's just one among many things that went downhill with ARR.