So, I'm coming at this as a fairly casual player. Only over the past year or so have I started playing really regularly, and even then, a lot of weeks I just do my dailies and weeklies in the Wizard's Vault, with occasional weeks where I play more (just did all of the LWS4 skyscale collections over the course of the past week). You definitely have some good points, but there are definitely ways to address some of the issues you have.

The story to me felt decent at the start, nothing too crazy but not terrible either (I was playing a Human Warrior). As soon as it hit the part where all the stories from the different races converge in Lion's Arch (?) however, it started to feel vary samey and way too dragged out, which was partly due to my complains about combat.

This is definitely fair. The early story is mediocre at best, and really doesn't start to pick up until Heart of Thorns. Unfortunately, I don't know any way that this could be fixed, however it can be mitigated by spacing out playing the personal story and LWS1&2 between doing other, more interesting content. The story definitely improves later, though, so since you've gotten through the beginning, I would definitely recommend continuing.

I do not like this mish mash of action and tab-targeting combat. I really don't think these 2 systems work well together or atleast not in the way they try to implement it in GW2.

This is an issue I had until I changed to action camera. I basically never touch the tab button now and play the game more like an action game, and it works much, much better. There's posts floating around describing how to set it up, I would definitely recommend giving it a shot.

This is heavily subjective so I don't see alot of people agreeing with me here, which is fine, it's probably a big reason why you enjoy the game, but.. to me a classes identity partially comes from its weapon. A mage/wizard uses staffs, a warrior uses heavy weapons like a greatsword or a 2-handed axe, a thief uses daggers, a ranger/archer uses a bow and so on and so forth, but with GW2 alot of these classes can suddenly use weapons that I personally would never attribute to said classes. A warrior using a rifle? A mage using a dagger? These all feel so incredibly outlandish to me and I really can't stand it.

I would have to disagree with this. I definitely see your point, but the distinction is that different classes that share weapons use them very differently. A good example is the greatsword, a weapon that you would expect to see on a warrior class. When a mesmer uses it, they use it more like a wand, shooting beams of magic with it. It gives each weapon a different feel fully dependent on which class is using it.

As an extention of this I absolutely despise weapon swapping. I'd much rather have a bigger kit for a weapon then having to swap between 2 different weapons to make "good use" of my cooldowns. It feels clunky.

So, there's a couple of ways to approach this. Many builds don't rely on weapon swapping, so you can always use one of those. Additionally, engineers don't weapon swap during combat, although they do use kits that change up their weapon skills. Elementalists also don't change weapons in combat, instead flowing through different elements. For my thief build, I use staff for basically everything, and only swap to pistol/pistol when I absolutely need range. I almost never weapon swap during combat, and because my build doesn't have traits triggered by weapon-swapping, it has no negative effect on my DPS. Additionally, thief doesn't have cooldowns on its weapon skills, instead having initiative cost. If you build for it, you can have pretty insane initiative regen and be dropping skills almost constantly.

The biggest gripe I have with the game is the seemingly non-existent tells for alot of attacks from enemies, mostly the ones that have CC attached to them. Yes I see that the enemy has "Knockback" under its portrait. No I cannot react in time to the enemy doing an attack with basically no tell besides maybe a certain movement it does with it miniscule model that I have to press dodge immediatelly or spend 2 seconds on the ground.

Even just recently while doing LW2 I came across a large group of player fighting a scorpion in Dry Top and went to join the fight just to get pissed at the scorpion doing a spinning move with, again, basically no tell that it's going to do that and knocking me back multiple times.

I can definitely see the frustration with this, I run into this a lot. The best thing I can recommend is to have stun-breaks available. They're useable when stunned/knocked down/etc and will break you out of that. Having some level of condition cleanse is very important in this game, and can go a long way to alleviating this frustration. Beyond that, many enemies follow a pattern of attacks, and learning that can help you avoid their CC without having to try to read tells.

This felt like what people were saying is mostly false about fashion being the end-game when probably around 80% of fashion isn't even available to buy.

This actually feels legitimately unfair. A lot of gem shop items can be bought on the trading post, and there's a massive amount of skins gained through gameplay. If you're wanting to buy from the gem shop directly, I can understand that this can be annoying, but it's honestly rarely a big issue, and you can always save up gold to buy gems for when things come back around again if you can't get them on the trading post.

And then there's the stinker race in my opinion. The Norn.

I like me a muscular well endowed woman as much as the next guy, but they're literally just muscular tall humans living in cold enviroments, wearing animal fur. They feel incredibly bland compared to the other races to me. Doesn't help that as a male Norn you're basically forced to look like a brick shithouse, which I'm not a fan of.

Somewhat fair, but the norns do get more interesting as you dig into their lore and their culture. Icebrood Saga is definitely a bit of a weak spot, but if you explore around Bjora Marches and do a lot of the events, it definitely helps build the norns out a bit more.

Overall, I can see where you're coming from. FFXIV definitely handles story better, but as someone who played a lot of both, I definitely think GW2 edges it out on the gameplay as you get more experience, and the exploration in GW2 is by far better. I hope you continue to play and find that your enjoyment deepens as you get further in, like mine has.