The Praetorium experience, so to speak, is why Square saw to it that there's extremely few story-relevant cutscenes contained during instances anymore. It frustrates returning players that are running content for other reasons to have to wait on players going through long cutscenes; it frustrates new players when the returning players just charge on ahead, etc.

Unfortunately there's no real functional solution to this. If it wasn't incentivized to return to it, you'd pretty much never be able to finish the ARR story, so in a way it's still a "Lesser of two evils" solution.

The good news is that with Heavensward, you can do Castrum/Praetorium with undersized parties instead of needing to fill via Duty Finder. I'm pretty sure I could probably solo Praetorium as a level 60 healer; you could probably find friends in an FC or LS (if you've joined any) that could do so with you.