After around 290 hours I've finally caught up and finished Shadowbringers, that was quite the ride.
Starting and finishing ARR was definitely rough, playing with the road to 70 buff helped a lot though, I'm not sure how far I would have gotten without it. Like everyone says, Heavensward was a large improvement and I can safely say by then I was hooked.
I was worried about Stormblood being a big drop off in quality going off what people said, but I actually really enjoyed the story and the ending got me pretty hyped to see what happened next.
At the beginning of Shadowbringers, I was already like "this gonna b gud" and for the most part it definitely was. I guess after all the hype, I was just a little disappointed that there was a chuck of stories that just felt like filler and I didn't really find interesting, but when the story was good, it was really good.
I pretty much just stuck to the MSQ, until shadowbringers where I actually had to do side quests for leveling. The only raid I did was the Crystal Tower since it was highly recommended to experience that story before Shadowbringers, and now I can see why.
Now that I'm caught up, I'm wondering if there were any good stories I might have missed along the way. Is there a Heavensward or Stormblood raid that is worth going back and doing the quests for? or perhaps a special chain of side quests?