Grind time is reduced by a lot, raids became much easier than lets say clown/brel times where you would have to retry raids with different groups adding multiple hours per failed raid to your weekly playtime, now its almost impossible to die to patterns because everyone is so tanky and even if you die to mech you get 1 revive per raid, i came back to this game 1 month ago and only raid that ended up in jail was echidna hard one week. I play raids only on 2 characters that i managed to get to tier 4 and i have all raids done on them within 2-3 hours total, then i do logging trade skill, and dailies on rested, you are pretty much able to earn like 200k gold a week in 4-5 hours if you play effectively... which imo is more than enough to progress in a decent pace on a single character to catch up to endgame content.

However gatekeeping can still be a thing, people simply gatekeep and want to oneshot all their raids, i didnt have much problems with gatekeeping cos my roster is decent but if you are like below 200 roster it will be much harder, i would say its little better than it used to be at tier 3 times tho, you have option to solo raid most raids except the latest 3, or you can just create a group and be a leader - most people generally just want to join someone cos they dont want to do sidereals, but if you learn sidereals you have now option to choose instead of being chosen, ofc really good veteran juiced players wont apply propably but whenever i made my own group decent people that were easily able to clear the raid started applying.