I love Gridania for the fact that it's so isolated and a maze type of zone, reminds me of Kahzam jungle in XI and yes I was a fan of Windurst too.
The fact that nobody likes it and avoids the place actually validates the lore, it's a tough place to get to and it's people guard their secrets tightly. :P

With any MMO it's really important to research people's specs and find out how to adjust your settings, if I dare to turn on occlusion or depth of field I am in trouble the game barely runs. Without it everything is smooth. One day I'll have a processor that can handle this game full graphics, but not today.

Wildlife, armor, terrain, it's all made to be somewhat 'realistic' and therefore to many people boring. Personally I prefer this approach, at first everything is mundane like the start of a great adventure movie or book, but the more time goes by and the further you go the more outlandish everything gets, that's my guess of where this game was supposed to go.

There's been a lot of fixes that if you don't look for them you won't notice, yes the UI works a lot better, we've not seen the really big updates yet because adding functionality to the UI and market wards were priority. But that's coming soon. If you want content there are real quests now when you are in a city pay attention to your compass map and you'll encounter exclamation marks. Next up for fixing sounds like it's the battle system so don't expect any major content addition in the next 3 months either, in my opinion anyway, it seems there is just too much they want to change with the classes that's going to take some time.