Also my brother joined to play with me and it really didn't take him long to get to HW content and I was perfectly happy to help him through all his dungeons and trials. If your friends aren't helping you "catch up" why are you even playing with them? Sounds more like they are just selfish and don't care about your enjoyment of the game.

Also it took me less than a week to level an alt to HWs content with no help from other people. It honestly isn't punishment to require you to do the MSQs. The story is linear and honestly I'm really not sure why you'd expect an RPG to be different than that.