I'm sorry your first experience was so bad. Mine was as well. I actually queued up the other day and it turned out 6 of the others were running an FC mate through Prae for the first time. I am always happy to help a new person go through these dungeons the "right" way at least once, so I didn't mind at all. They were happily surprised and I made some new friends from it, since it turned out they were from my server.

I think the current setup is very newbie unfriendly, though, since experienced players are only queuing in DF for these dungeons for a speedrun most of the time. If SE wants to maintain a game that is as story-focused on this, they will need to rethink this step, since you cannot complete the first part of the game without it. And the sort of bad experience you had could put someone off the game entirely.