I've been levelling up an alt character with my GF who just started the game. She's watching every single cutscene and I can say that I completely agree with OP. We reached 70 recently and we still need to go through the 4.4 and 4.5 stories now. I can safely say that at least 70% of our levelling time was just spent watching cutscenes. Sometimes you just got out of a cutscene, then you go from one NPC to another, it takes at most 30sec and then you get another 15min of cutscene, sometimes more. It's non-stop. Yes you can skip them, but for people who want to know what's happening with all these characters it's not an option. And forcing people to spend so much time watching cutscenes isn't the only way to build an interesting story in a video game. There is a LOT of useless padding in there. I strongly think that the whole main storyline of the game should be completely revamped pacing-wise or just become optional, especially the big "max level" portions (which are at level 50, 60 and 70). At this point I'm wondering if it hasn't been done on purpose just to sell more jump-potions.

I didn't think it was that bad before because I started playing back in 2.0. I did everything patches after patches so it wasn't such a chore for me. Making this alt character made me realize how much of a pain it must be for new players right now and it's only going to be worse with each expansion if they don't do something about it.