You do have the option to skip the story if you wish to buy it, as I recall it is even on sale right now. As for getting the person in question to the level to do the content you can just skip ARR and do PoTD or get a tank/healer to spam dungeons with to get to the levels required. Then in ShB you can go

I would agree the ARR patch content needs a trim but as I have leveled several alts before I don't even know what you would trim really aside from the fetch quests and most of 2.1 A lot of the "pointless fetch quests" actually do develop things for later story arcs such as characters and locations. The instances also teach you mechanics that show up in a boss I swear was designed to go "Did you do the ARR patch content" in SB.