MSQ

[Arkevorkhat]

SE already offers us to skip MSQ to current expansion with a price.
I don't see any reason not to pay it if MSQ is pointless. You'd be wasting your game time otherwise.

This is the real answer here, and the reason that most of the suggestions in this thread will never be implemented.

Square-enix has a financial incentive to make story skip books as appealing as possible, and so every change to the MSQ that makes it faster or easier is a potential skip book that they've potentially shot themselves in the foot on.

I'd bet money that the reason behind the ARR changes in 5.3 was that SE's management decided that the potential lost revenue from not having as many people skip ARR would be balanced out by an increase in people moving from free trial to paid accounts. There's little reason to devote development time to trimming ARR while simultaneously expanding the trial, outside of calculated financial incentive.