You can, but in terms of actual effort put in the core races are just a tiny bit easier at the cost of being infinitely more monotonous.
It is annoying that if you want to race change to a new AR and also get the appearance then you would probably need to make a character just for levelling, so that might be something to change, but all in all I never had much of a problem with the levelling part, I found it nice and therapeutic when combined with the increasingly more user friendly levelling.