The “story” while leveling is a mess.
You go to warn the leaders of things but wait! Oh, no. We are all running out of anima and need help with random unrelated tasks first!
I promise if you do all these other things for us I’ll take you to our leader with your potentially worlds-ending news.
Then each leader proceeds to ignore everything you tell them and you start over in the next zone.
*edit- Any story that needs multiple outside sources to be told is not a strong story, imo.
I liked the de-emphasis of technobabble quests - always hated those - but it felt the questing could have been a good opportunity to world-build. And they just didnt take that opportunity.
To me, the quality of storylines and the questing experience, especially during leveling, are not exactly the same thing. I often find good side quests when not doing them for EXP, while the leveling experience for the main quest lines is just fine. I agree with you that, in SL, some stories shouldn’t been locked behind covenant.