Is anyone else not really enjoying themselves?

[PaleYonder]

I still plan on checking out the crafter quests eventually, but from your description, it might still fall on the same issue for me. I don't feel like I have a reason to care about the folklore...which is ironic considering they tried to hammer down the "learn other cultures" aspect so badly during the whole story. It's the lack of good character writing for me. I want to care about the characters, and that makes me care about where they live, not the other way around.

I think that's the "bad" part of being too attached to one aspect of the game...it took my enjoyment away from everything else. Which up until the end of 6.0 it didn't feel like a problem at all in this game, but now it seems to be.

I'm pretty much the same, I somehow didn't expect the main quest could turn this bad all of a sudden, and since it was the thing I liked the most, now everything's tainted by that. Some activities are still fun, yeah, but it's not the same. I'm basically running a test on myself, "While my sub is still running, is this game still worth it for me in the future?" Like with many people, it's accompanied me through some very rough patches in life, but if it turns out this is it, then that's how it is.

And also same on the cultures. I don't need every character to be a complex multilayered masterpiece of writing, but they need to be the bare minimum of characters, and if I'm going to learn about cultures, I need something cool, something unique, something with at least a tiny speck of originality and depth and something to say. In Dawntrail I just don't care. I need more than "fairtrade and alpacas" or "tacos".
I don't have a crafter on that level yet, but if I get there, I'll check out the quests; I'm now curious if it's so much better, and if it is, it's a damned shame they didn't care about the MSQ enough to swap things out somehow. That's the one that should be getting the first pick of the good stuff.