Honestly, another 20-30 quests taken out of the 2.1-.5 area would be sufficient to get people into Heavensward without many complaints. And by taking out another 20-30 quests, I mean legitimately taking it completely out of the game and deleting it out of any progression blocks and adding absolutely NOTHING else back in it's spot to pad out game time, or anything else. No more you need to go do raids or dungeons or any of that. Nothing would be lost, everything would be much more palette-able and would be less of a lull to slog through.

That being said, I doubt we'll see any of this "soon", as it took literally years for them to recognize this was an issue, and the answer was implemented in pretty bad fashion imo. Deciding to make the crystal tower series mandatory also was not good in my opinion. I'm not opposed to raid content etc, but why release the shadowbringers expansion and leave it like that for a year, before retro-actively making it mandatory? If people were that invested in the lore and wanted to know more, the raids were there, the story line was there, and there were plenty of indicators toward its existence. I don't mean to just gripe, I'm glad they did prune the 20 quests out, but adding something that would roughly equate to that amount of quests anyway is not expediting anything. Revisiting the cutting block though, and chopping off the 30'ish other quests that are completely needlessly tacked on there would do wonders.