I tend to deal with this by not doing the treadmill.
I have everything at level 50 and instead of grinding everything i just take a casual approach to enjoying content when i feel like it.
My Bard is my main so i can grind that a little if i want to be geared enough for some of the higher content, but i never get too caught up in the maxing.
For this reason the open world content is very important to me, and i do hope the expansion does more with that.
I'd like for there to be some really tough to reach gathering nodes that you have to work around dangerous monsters in deep areas to find.