Yeah, 2.x was a chonk. I took a break from 2.3 to I want to say 3.1 and catching up took quite a while. I speak from experience when I said it will probably feel like you're in HW once you get to the later quests even though you technically aren't. Doing 2.x and 3.0 in one go took a very long time and felt like one big story since the last sections of 2.x are a direct lead-in to 3.0 story-wise. Aside from the 2.0 section, it's definitely the biggest section of the MSQ. The other expansions were not as linked as those two were.