I understand crafting is a core part of this game and almost everything you do in game gives you experience, but the problem is most of them don’t give you good experience. Personally I don’t find grinding out tradeskills fun and tend to push those off until I reach the cap and go back later, but the pacing is very poorly designed in this game with quests more often than not out leveling you or just running out of them entirely besides the town board stuff. Fation missions are in the same boat. This is compounded by the amount of running you have to do for a lot of these quests with very little reward in terms of experience a lot of the time. I’m currently level 38 and it has come to a halt as I’m out of regular quests in both Brightwood and Weaver’s Fen with the exception of an elite group quest that I 'm waiting for some help with from a friend, but there’s nothing that nets even decent experience in the meantime. Dungeons require orbs or being on the main quest and don’t give great exp to begin with which is disappointing. It also doesn’t help that I’m on a server where my faction only owns 2 zones making traveling extremely expensive and have exhausted all of my azoth traveling around. That is of course an entirely separate issue that I’m sure has its own threads and discussions for.
That is just my personal experience, but I do wish the alternatives would give equal exp to crafting related quests so you can actually pick and choose how you want to level without it being semi detrimental to the speed in terms of slowing it down in comparison.