It’s not that ARR is bad, just that Heavensward was such a jump in the quality of both writing and voice acting that it makes ARR look bad in hindsight. And the slog was actually the post-ARR section (ie patch content). It was awful. Largely cleaned up now though. Still long.

If you ever do play, the biggest mistake you can make is to rush to endgame. You’ll burn out. Take it slow, read the dialog, watch the cutscenes, and you’ll have a much better time. It is Final Fantasy after all.

You don’t need to make an alt to play a different class. The game encourages multiclassing and there is an ingame server transfer system so need to make one for other servers either. But yeah if you do make an alt you need to go through it all again.

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.