Cutscenes from a new player's perspective:

[KisaiTenshi]

The problem, really, is that they decided to make these "cinematic" (since they were the end-game point at that point in time.)

There's unfortunately no good way to deal with it now, because you don't want to damage it and deny future players the ability to play it as it was intended, but don't want to force players to watch the cutscenes and then have new players unable to progress past that point. About all they could do now is make it optionally solo (like the end of 3.x) and re-scale the combat difficulty so that it actually presents a challenge while having 7 computer player combatants that are at least as smart as the current command mission npc's (which is, not smart enough to not stand in bad, but smart enough to turn the boss away from the party.) Making "multiplayer" content into solo content is not really a good solution, though it does present a solution to the "I want to run something for experience" players who would otherwise be unable to find players due to queuing as DPS.

In another game, they had to "streamline" portions of the MSQ because players would never, ever, help. (No roulettes), so you know what they did? They made every story quest solo. It, butchered the MSQ of that game. This is why it's important that people record their MMO games, because sometimes the developers opts nerf, change, or delete content under the misguided notion that it's not fun, rather than maybe create AI players to auto-fill missing multi-player slots in the party.