There's plenty of players doing their "leveling" roulette. I would suggest queuing up as your Scholar in order to minimize the wait time, and if worse comes to worse, you can always look for a lv60 to run you through it.

In terms of the topic of having to do the MSQ to reach Heavensward content, it's something that was debated over heavily. While I agree that the hump can seem difficult to climb, the story would make no sense if you just suddenly walked into Ishgard.