SE won't remove the story from raids. They understand the importance of attaching a lore and a reason to everything. A lot of "raider" players may not care, but a lot of people enjoy the story attached to them as well, and others just play for completely different reasons like glamour, RP, the story, or more casual content like roulettes, treasure maps, hunting and gold saucer activities and the lore is important to a lot of these players.

What you will notice is that every single interaction with raid NPCs takes you into a full-blown cut scene which can be re-viewed via The Unending Journey. This is because they know a lot of people will skip them and then wish to re-watch them later on when the day-one pressure is off.

It's also the case that you only need to complete 4.0 without its subsequent patches to enter content like Omega, Eureka and non-MSQ dungeons and trials, the cut scenes of which you can skip and re-watch. That's about as far as they can unshackle it I think.