Oh yeah it's a slog, the great divider that everyone has to overcome. They need to do another pass on reducing the amount of stuff and one of the problems is that buried in the trivial ARR stuff is some important information for later. It's sadly in a state of "just wait, it gets good after the first season".

I know. It's the only MMO I stay actively subscribed too. I pre-ordered endwalker digital collectors edition and will be doing the same for dawntrail. It's one of my favorite games.

You are exaggerating, I played it all and it took somewhere between 200 and 300 hours (including side content and most raids at least once).

You are exaggerating. You can complete the entire MSQ up to EW in less than 3 days in-game playtime. Source: You can find raiders with alts that have sprout icons, and I've done it myself twice.

But I get it, you need to know exactly what to do and skip cutscenes. You also can't do any side questing and once you leave an area, never look back. Which most would rightly criticize me for suggesting. The story is good.

Honestly, if the concern is anything other than the story, it's probably not the game for you anyways.

I'd also like to point out that most content is built to be relevant, so you'll be doing content with the rest of the player base in just a few hours of playtime. We have the opposite queue problem in contrast to other games: You aren't waiting for other new players to show up to complete content; you are waiting for the servers to fit you into a party that hundreds of other players of various levels want to also do.

Wait, they just give you mounts now? You used to have to wait until level 20 to buy a mount. Level 20 took forever, and then you could only buy the slow mount for your race. You didn't get a fast mount until level 40, which took a very long time. Then you had to grind reputation for different factions to buy their expensive mounts. Some rare mounts could be found through seasonal events or in raids. I ran Tempest Keep every week for 2.5 years before I finally got Ashes of Al'ar to drop for me.

No. No way to skip the story as far as I'm aware and it'd be a bad idea honestly as the story continues right from ARR to all the expansions, endwalker has a lot of callbacks to everything before it as it's a swansong of something like 8 years. Dawntrail is the first new major story arc since FFXIV's release. Leveling isn't so bad currently because it's boosted to get as many people to 90 as much as possible but there's no max level item either as far as I'm aware as you pick a class then that class becomes a specialisation so you're constantly getting new abilities to learn for your rotation. It would defeat the point of learning your specialisation if you skipped the leveling and quests of it to max level and had everything unlocked.