First point, some of the post-ARR quests were indeed pruned out. So, if you cleared Ultimate Weapon since 5.3, you might've benefited from that. About 20 quests removed.

Personally, while everyone will say "it gets better" and, admittedly there is a bit of streamlining along the way, I sorta find no part of the story completely free of tedium. That's just the nature of the game. The entire genre, surely. It's a subscription-based game. Naturally keeping you subscribed is the goal. If you can race through quests and be done in a month, they're losing out, compared to throttling player progress enough to drag that process out.

So, yeah. There's arguably less of the "why am I even doing this?" moments. But, I'm up here progressing 5.0 story and I'm still passing out food and hand-delivering messages.

As a silent protagonist with no personality, you're a glorified errand runner. And occasionally they let you kill things.

In conclusion. Heavensward has dragons. So, it's not all bad.