I've been wondering... once the game has a few expansions, there's no way players will be forced to play through hundreds of hours of main quest to get to current content.

What will happen then? I really don't want the story to be "missable" if you don't start playing before a certain expansion comes along, they already did that once and that's enough.

Best way would be to overhaul the story and cut out all the fluff quests I guess. How did FFXI do it?