Bad spots? You have a talent for understatement! I've now spent about
half of my entire play time in FF 14 just doing the filler content before Heavensward. It's not even interesting content, other than the Trials it's just filler, pure and simple.
It's very literally, (that is Literally, Literally not the kind of "literaly" that really means figuratively),
one hundred more quests you need to do. That's just rediculous. If I was to hazzard a guess, it would be doing this quest where most people just up and stop playing the game, especially if like me it happens to coincide with coming up to the end of the first 30 days play time you get for buying the game. It needs to go. If Squeenix are insistant on keeping the story line intact, then they should consider abridging the quest line to just the key points and cut it down to maybe 15-20 or so quests. In it's current form, it feels like Fetch Questing hell.
I've made no secret of the fact that I wholeheartedly dislike the story FF 14 has. I consider it badly thought out, badly written and badly presented to the player. FF 14 isn't alone there though, I've yet to come across an MMO that handled story elements well. As far as I'm concerned, the story should only be there to give some context to the players actions in game, not as the main attraction of the game. When the story is trying to impose itself as being more important than the gameplay, then I tend to take issue with it. I never finished Mass Effect or The Witcher for much the same reasons.
But this line of discussion is getting us nowhere, so allow me to refocus it. How and why do people think story improves the game? Are there any benefits to having unlocks tied to story line progression? Given how passionately people defend both, there must be a reason why.