Well we don't need voice acting for EVERY NPC in the game, it's honestly fine with just the main storyline. MMOs that does this on even a smaller scale reuse the same voice pool for every town because it's a lot of unnecessary work to voice out hundreds of NPCs when you can just voice out 8 and reuse it 100 times, which then makes it stale and feel lazily done.

Everything stated so far for 2.0 will make it a great game. Most of the competition as you say are generally just doing the same thing, the only reason ToR is even being looked at is because it's by Bioware, the game itself isn't that great, it's only strength is storytelling.

They stated when they introduced quests that it was mainly to get the framework in (remember: FFXIV is under an Overhaul.) and better quality quests would be coming in time, most quests are about talking to NPCs which is true, but it gives you backstories and more lore -- Most MMOs give you "lore" by giving you a popup box with text you likely don't read which end in telling you to kill 10 bores, next chain, kill 10 tigers, next chain kill 10 orcs, next chain kill 10 higher leveled bores ad infinitum.