My problem with leveling up in FFXIV.

[Jojoya]

Also fail to see how disliking early leveling in the game = RPG games not being for you.

He's not really complaining about the early leveling, though. He's complaining about how the MSQ design doesn't work well with what he wants to be doing with his limited schedule.

Getting past ARR does not remove all the quests that need to be read, cutscenes that need to be watched or traveling that needs to be done in the remainder of the MSQ. Those things all still exist and still take up a significant amount of time. A friend and I were joking around as we were leveling our alts through 5.0 together about how it felt like we were spending 10 minutes doing those things for every 2 minutes of combat required.

That is what the OP is complaining about - the lack of "action" while he plays. He's got to spend so much time in the more passive aspects of the story that it feels like he's not getting much done. And that isn't going to change for him until he either completes the MSQ all the way to 5.0 or decides he's going to put the MSQ aside to focus on the more "active" content he prefers.

But doing the latter means it's going to hinder his character progression. Access to new zones, new dungeons, new trials require MSQ progression. Access to certain job abilities require MSQ progression (can't do a job quest if you can't get into the zone for the quest even if you've gotten to the correct level through other content and some abilities are job quest rewards).

I'm not going tell him that RPGs are not right for him. There are lots of different game design styles to be found in RPGs and some of them work well with the type of schedule the OP describes.

I am going to warn the OP that this specific MMORPG might not be right for him because based on what he said he wants to be doing in the time he has available to play, there's a good chance it isn't. I'm not going to sugar-coat things and pretend everything is going to be better for him just because he's past the ARR portion of the MSQ because the ARR MSQ is not the real problem.

Ultimately it's his decision to make. Maybe he'll decide that he's starting to get immersed in the story so being "active" in his hour a night isn't as important. Maybe he'll decide he's happy with what content he's already unlocked and ignore MSQ progression to stick to the lower level content. Or maybe he'll decide he's just going to feel more frustrated than anything else and look for another game that fits his schedule better.

At least the discussion here has a chance of giving him information he needs to make a more informed decision about what is right for him.