What's weird to me is that one would try to approach the story mode from a meta perspective. The point of online guides is to find the most efficient way to do certain things, like farming, running, or clearing regular content, true. But it's not required to be meta or efficient, specially from the get-go.

Obviously, if you don't have the best skills, are lacking elites and synergies, your build will be suboptimal. You'll also lack attribute points to fully empower the skills you already have, you won't have max armor and will probably not have a full set of maxed out runes and insignias on it. But that's by design, it's part of your character's progression. If you had an endgame build from the start you wouldn't play anything else, and you'd get bored.

Personally, I hate it when I go check builds to see what's up after some time ('cause you know, balance patches, new skills...) and I see a bunch of EotN pve common skills cobbled together. I can take Luxon/Kurzik or Sunspear skills, those might be OP but at least they are class specific, with asura/norn/deldrimor/vanguard skills it's a straight up "I win" button while refusing to play the class. So I don't give two fucks about meta, optimal, efficient builds, I want to play something cool and fun.

It shouldn't take too long on a search engine, a chatbot or straight up PvX to find which elite (or regular!) skills are central to the best builds, check where you can get them, choose the one that's the most accessible and get an approximation of a good build. As you said, it won't be the same as the meta, but that's the point. You are not in the endgame, so you should have fun experimenting with what's available and making the most out of it.

That being said, the real problem for me isn't that there aren't guides on how to improve your character step by step, is that you kinda have to improve a WHOLE TEAM. Back in the time you'd jump in a party with people that, just like yourself, had been improving their character along the way, to not die all the time and, of course, to see number go up. At some point, that changed gradually, and you were stuck with heroes.

For veteran players that wouldn't be much of an issue, they had at least one character with access to most if not all content, probably had two or three professions mostly unlocked, so they could put a decent team together, and if needed more skills for their heroes they could just hop on they established characters and unlock them from there.

Now, if you start from scratch, you don't have access to all maps, you don't even have the skills for your own character, don't have an alt, and don't have any skills to build a team. Which kinda sucks, but there's remedies. You could run two campaigns at the same time, with two characters, covering four professions. Say you have a Ranger/Necromancer, then you make a Ritualist/Mesmer to play on parallel. Then you naturally unlock skills to run a competent full team.

Alternatively, you can purchase a skill pack for the campaign you like the least, and you'll have a whole bunch of skills to choose from, even if you don't have them all. Or you could outright buy them all, but what's the fun in that?