The good news is that you don’t have to make a new character to play different classes or jobs—you can play every job on one character, so if you don’t have any intentions of starting an alt, you only have to put up with that ARR slog once.

Imo, the worst part of ARR is a particular quest you have to do about halfway through. It just kills the momentum of the storyline. But it does pick up a lot by the end. If you ever do decide to give the game a try, you can play up to lv60 for free (with some limitations), which covers the base game and first expansion (Heavensward).

I’d highly recommend ignoring all side quests and focusing on the main story to get ARR out of the way ASAP. After that, the game really opens up and Heavensward improves dramatically in terms of pacing. But yeah, I totally hear you about not wanting to stick around with a game that starts off slow. I literally quit FFXIV for years because of ARR until I got the whim to get back into it last year lol.