The story is great, but it blatantly gets in the way of the rest of the game

[Amenara]

They went in expecting it to be exactly (or mostly) like any other MMO that doesn't have a heavy story focus. If you can't see why that's an issue, I don't know what to tell you.

So they went in with a reasonable expectation that it would be a similar to every other MMO out there experience? I think you might be missing the issue.

I don't necessarily think the story should be decoupled from everything but you sure as hell shouldn't have to slog through the 80 post ARR MSQ to unlock the first expansion and 3 jobs. SE needs to clean up the ARR questing experience more than removing 13% of the quests, it needs to be 30%+. There are a lot of drawn out plot points that can be simplified, there are a ton of quests that just don't need to exist anymore. I understand in the ARR times they needed to pad out the MSQ, especially in 2.1-2.3 since the things that happen can be condensed to a couple of quests, and nowadays it should be. In my opinion you should legitimately be able to watch the cutscenes and get from completion of 2.0 to start of HW in an afternoon.

I think the same can be said of every expansions x.1-x.5 patch cycle as well. It is an interesting story to tell, but at this point, it doesn't need to take months to complete.