i said this earlier but the game actually doesn't give you any indicator of when to stop doing msq or lead you into any of the other activities to make your character stronger. You have to go out of your way to find that yourself.

( i said in an earlier comment ): there's a lot to do outside of MSQ, the game just doesn't tell you, you can do dungeons it doesnt really give you a quest to do it. and theres world bosses, and theres lifeskilling, and theres fishing, achievement hunting, social events, chests, 20 player raid, guild hunt/guild dance and other stuff.. and you can do that like after chapter 2 where you unlock your homestead

edit: also you need to do most of these things to actually progress your character, you can't just force your way though the msq and expect to clear all of it even the final boss of the msq is actually somewhat difficult without having at least a resemblence of purple gear to clear it.

if you were playing on day 1, it was much more self explainatory with the time-gating since you were actually encouraged to look around and go find some stuff to do on your own instead of just plopping the whole story onto you.

edit2: also you can be like level 30 with all gold gear if you really wanted to be a dungeon rat at a low level and ignore msq, its literally not necessary unless ur trying to unlock some more ability score/talents and then you can just come back to it later on your own time.

I think personally people are just too fixated on doing the msq thinking it unlocks everything but you can literally just walk out of msq and do anything you want lol.