wow you guys sure are defensive, projecting much? You know what they say, the things that hurt you the most are those things which you know to be true...
I'm not being negative, trust me you will know when I shit on a game. There's a laundry list of faults with this game so far, i haven't said one word about them. I'm sorry if legitimate questions from a new player happen to highlight glaring faults with your beloved catgirl emulator, but you are the one reading in to things.
The thing I can't wrap my head around, is this is the improved game, like the game came out and somehow it was worse than this, so bad that they took it offline and reworked a bunch of shit and then this is what they released.
you keep saying its a story game, its the story, the story gets better. cool man I'm still playing it, holding out hope. looking forward to that actually. But the story becoming good after several expansions does not justify the gameplay or new player experience or the story you are forced to play through now by design because you can't skip the MSQ, everything is locked behind it.
Imagine for a moment you meet a guy who loves RPGs and plays them for the stories. planescape, baldurs gate, mass effect, elder scrolls, etc etc he's played them all. But he's lived all his life out in the boonies and he's never had internet, until today. He comes up to you, an experienced MMO player and asks "Hey man I really only play these things for the story, what MMO should I play?"
The correct answer is: Star Wars: The Old Republic, by a country mile. It's not even close. If you tell him "FF14" then you are a fucking liar and a piece of shit and that guy will hate you for the rest of his life. I can't judge the story that eventually comes in the expansions after slogging through 100hrs in the base game because i'm still slogging through ARR, but that's the point. You can't skip it, you have to endure the slog.
SW:TOR wanted to be a WoW killer, ended up being universally accepted as the greatest single player MMO ever released, and they just leaned in to that. Everything they release continues to focus on expanding the story experience and streamlining older content so that you can experience it solo in story mode. That is a story MMO, and it's what I'll judge FF14s story by whenever this story actually starts getting good.