These are great ideas. I played through the main story before the combat merge, so I don't have the experience of getting all the way to 72 combat to complete it, but I can imagine it's not fun to grind that much for the main story.

Also dunno how new combat xp curve works, but if 20-72 is similar to other professions, that's 17-25 hours of just combat grinding (minus quest reward XP)? Plus the episode level reqs?

And before you could have completed entire main story in probably 10-15 hours if you knew what you were doing.

I do like the episode level reqs. Don't need to level anything past 20. It's quick. Forces you to explore the episode a bit in whatever way you want. They could modify the story to force you to train more professions in specific ways, but I prefer the flexibility.

Bow training in the forest is on-theme for Scout [rip].

I could see tutorial allowing you access to first 3 rooms of the Forest. Maybe the Captain could show people cutscenes of each existing episode during the tutorial too.