sidequests are a waste of time

[Catapult]

Players only skip through the text if they CHOOSE to not care, if they WANT it to be over and done with rather than trying to be brought into the story.
The fact that you believe they are uninteresting and presented in no dramatic context emphasizes that you are such a person, thus having missed out on the bucket-loads of lore they present.

Quest goals have become more diverse since the first batch. Granted that they still involve "go here, do something, come back" but just about every game on the market follows this formula. You're playing a freakin' MMO for goodness sake - the very concept of an MMO involves repetitive activities, else the game would not maintain subscribers.

Voiced cutscenes? If you want them that bad, then you can pay for the voice actors to be brought in every month for the new patch content. This is expensive. It would be viable if you had all the content to do at once, but not when you're patching it in on the fly like with this game.
An absence of voice-acting also has a place in games anyway - it encourages people to use their imagination. Ever tried that?