Lets face it. SOME of the enjoyment you (or most gamers have) as players is to show off. At least thats what i think in my opinion. And it is not a bad thing, its natural.
Ranking serves partly for showing off. If everyone were 50 that wouldnt be all that exciting. If you were to max 3 classes at the moment, a lot of people would "wow" at you, and most players would be proud of it! (except those that will always call you a nolife LOL)
If you were in an LS or guild full of rank 90's that take an year to get, you'd be proud of it and show it off...
Leveling makes me feel im having progress even if i actually improove very little between every level. Just seeing my number change is enough to give me that feeling and I'd like as much levels possible as i can get.
Which is also why I'm against removing Physical levels. Even if they change stast to automatic, they should keep physicial lvls. If I played one hour and rank once i'd feel like i did less progress than if i ranked AND leveled.
What I'm saying is, the more stuff we can lvl and rank, the more we feel progress, if they add a lvling curve to everything and we could also level up skills, instead of one hour grinding to get 1 rank. we would grind for 1 hour even if after all these lvls it will be equal to what we have now, it'd still feel like we did much more progress since now we can only lvl and rank on 2 aspects only at a time (3 with shield).
My English is bad so ill give example of a game i played. Phantasy Star Online, and Phantasy Star Universe.
In PSO you could buy skills which meant lvling only applied to character's base lvl. In PSU you could level skills which meant lvling could happen WITH character and WITH skills, so if in one day on PSO i'd do 1 lvl. In 1 day on PSU i'd do 1 lvl, 1 fire lvl, 1 water lvl, 1 heal lvl, 1 revive lvl... It'd feel like i lvled MUCH more even though im in the same state i was on PSO.
I have a "grinding" party we form DAILY, we been grinding for like a month, and it actually feels like a permanent party and like i knew them for YEARS, since they were little kids.
I cant explain this good but it has some kind of magic to some players.
Anyway I dont understand what is being asked here... an RPG without lvling or ranking?
I think that if you hate grinding you should really move on to a different genre... Not an Online RPG
And well, with all the aim for casual SE is doing, i wouldnt worry about being much above rank 50 to access most of the stuff.