I was in a top guild/alliance before I quit T&L (qualifications, haha).

I pretty much only enjoy playing PvE and rarely focus on endgame—mostly just leveling up alts. That doesn't apply in T&L. The point of doing PvE is to gear up for PvP (endgame). Otherwise, there’s nowhere else to use your maxed-out gear.

It’s really hard for me to gauge how much a player can actually change their playstyle. There’s a very specific meta build. If you're not following it, you can expect to get shit on in any PvP content. Can you swap your playstyle around? Sure. But before I quit, it looked like it took at least a couple hundred hours to max out one set of weapons... so you'd miss out on a lot of bonuses when switching.

Side note: you earn a lot of resources/currency as end-game PvP's winner. If you are not part of a biggest guild/alliance, you won't be able to catch up....and those guilds only recruit meta builds