Yeah, I think there's definitely some merit to OP's idea and the game had, inadvertently or otherwise, managed to fit other content in with the MSQ in previous expansions better. I think 100% MSQ only really started with EW intentionally, anyways, which made sense given they were trying to wrap everything up.

But other posters aren't wrong that they shouldn't be able to just do the MSQ and that the pacing and writing issues would be sufficiently addressed by the thread idea.

I wanted to toss in that I felt like the previous expansions giving me more combat through the MSQ (as my own character, by the way) contributed more opportunities to get good at my job before I subjected endgame groups to me. As boring as they can be, FATE bosses sure gave me a compelling reason to want to maximize my DPS.

I'd argue the MSQ mostly just teaches us how to read instead of play now, except that we clearly still struggle to read our actions or boss debuffs...