I think the fact that most of the game is soloable, if not all, wipes away most of the normal MMO problems with grind and bloat. You have all the time in the world, thanks to no sub, and you are entirely beholden to your own desires. No "outdated" content because the levels are stuck at 20 forever and no need to git gud to go fast to keep up with impatient retards.

Just do what you want and if you don't care about being slightly more powerful you don't have to, as long as its fun.

But I do agree that some of the titles were ridiculous, probably as a result of the move towards the final expansions big hall thing regarding them (that directly leads into GW2 benefits).

However, players themselves did Legendary Defender of Ascalon entirely for fun and that was worst than any other grind by far and would take most of a year where you couldn't do anything else in the game. Its been nerfed now to be "only" a few months, but it only exists because players did it and that gave the devs the idea that players wanted that I think.