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.