The game is brilliant and has so much to do, it's just a shame the publishers are a mess. That said hopefully in a week or two things settle down and people really see how good it is and not how long the queues are, which I do agree is awful and should never be this bad.
If all you want to do is quest then yes it is a grind and very basic. The game is semi sandbox so basically the questing isn't the main focus but it's there for those who enjoy it and it's a way to get to level 50.
That said if you have the labour it's not the quickest way, that would be crafting, gathering, farming but you soon run out of labour.
You could become a gatherer, a farmer, a crafter. You could play just for PvP, questing, trade runs.
You can build your house or like me, build 2 large farms and 2 small farms so i have plenty of space for farming.
Decide what build you would like, plenty of info on the net and select those 3 trees, once you hit level 50 they will be at level 50. You have the ability to select 23 skills at level 50 so there is lots of options.
The biggest grind to the game is weapons and armour, once you hit Tier 6 crafted weapons then its complete RNG, the stats are random so you can craft your T6 and it have none of the stats you want. This gets expensive, i'm currently using a T5 weapon but waiting for my guilds weaponsmith to hit 20k so he can craft me a T6.