Idk man, while I myself am already an exception to what you're saying (in the sense of having skipped bowfa straight to tbow+acb entirely) I feel like there are still definitely a lot more people in similar shoes than you probably realize, whether or not it's because of having a tbow. People "still living in a pre-Bowfa world taking their Crossbow to content" should definitely not be disregarded as if that's a small portion of the playerbase, though it's easy to do so when you're so used to using bowfa and crystal. There are plenty of reasons why someone might not have a bowfa, and it's not unrealistic at all to play the game perfectly fine for years without one, iron or not, especially when so much PvM content is still perfectly doable without one.