But that's bad story design for two reasons:
1. If you make the story optional, but not presented easily, then there are people who will never realize why they're doing what they're doing. When I played the beta, I never really knew why I was helping anyone apart from "well, they're charr, and I'm charr, and they need help, and I need XP...alright I'll go do it." Even if you abhor reading quest text, at least the story of what you need to do is splashed right in front of you, and you can look back at it any time until you complete the quest.
2. If you continue designing your story based off of assuming players actually dig into it, eventually you will have people get lost because they missed something along the way. This problem is exacerbated by references to GW1 that many players may never have experienced or heard of. My beta experiences left me further confused as I continued to play, and I wondered just why I should care about anything I was doing.
Also, I like how you say that players should go around and talk to every NPC to get the story, when you basically do that in WoW with quest text! Imagine that.
I'll also concur with the disjointed feeling some have mentioned by having to abandon their current path for a while because they had to go grind up some more levels elsewhere before resuming. It makes the game play...oddly. When your momentum gets thrown for a curve, it's easy to lose incentive to keep playing, and probably contributed to my decision not to buy the game.
You really don't look at the game critically, I've got to say. Every post of yours I've seen has been glowing with praise to a fault, with your seeming disregard for anyone else's criticisms. The game's alright, but it's not that great.