Quest Hubs issues

[Dirich]

Yesterday I started Ruby Sea and did everything in the zone. It took me from morning to night, and it felt like I passed the entire day without really playing, so today I kept track of things.

Data
Yanxia, all quests (and aetheric currents) up to the last MSQ rewarding an aetheric current and excluding what that quest unlocks.
I was asked to kill a grand total of 12 mobs + 3 of a very weak type that took as much effort as a single normal mob. There was also a sort of "mini boss fight", which took quite a bit of time.

Combat time: 7 minutes.
Mini boss-fight: 5 minutes.
Travel + spam click to skip all dialogues for non MSQ stuff + read/watch everything MSQ related + non killing quests (i.e. interact-with-object, probably around 1 or 2 minutes total): 168 minutes.

To sum up, I barely used my character skills at all (12 minutes in 180, and half of that just because of the very special event "mini boss-fight").
Most of the time is spent walking around (and I try to optimize my pathing), skipping dialogues (I have not enough time to read through all that stuff), and watching/reading MSQ.


Issues
1. Only the dev can run a proper statistic, but I have the feeling most people skip through side quests dialogues, which make for wasted dev effort (since it's a MMORPG, thus many wants to reach max level fast - MSQ constraints already make FFXIV a game where such objective takes very long, compared to modern day average).
2. The quest hubs focus too much on non-combat quests. We barely get to actually play the game when going through the levelling experience.
3. It's not as bad as HW, but it still really feels as whoever designed the quests is trying to waste the player time by making the ratio of Travel-to-(Combat/DoQuestStuff) too skewed toward Travel.


Suggestions (for new content)
1. Reduce the Traveling needs before someone raeches flight/proper land mount movement speed.
2. Instead of having 2-3 non combat side quest per each combat side quest, use the opposite trend.

My only comparison (due to the road-to-60 effect), are the first couple of zones in ARR. They were better, as I spent more time playing and less time doing nothing but spam click or walk around.