I agree that the leveling curve is really brutal for new players, we tried during the beta to get them to relax level requirements for at least some things. Unfortunately, they didn't listen then, and I have yet to see any evidence that they listen here either. ):
For what it is worth I do still very much support changes to make things better for newer players! We get a lot of new players and barely keep any, and that isn't an accident.
But... the upshot is that you really aren't missing much, either. The profession with the highest useful, playtime-impacting ability is crafting, because it has the recipe you get from the mining weekly store to make the magical pickaxe that allows your wolf to mine without using stamina. The recipe to make it is soulbound, but at least the pick itself isn't, so there also the option to buy one and forget about it. Outside of the achievement rewards, there is no real big benefit to even getting to the profession cap, so don't sweat any of that too much.
High level Farming is nice if you really can't get enough of grinding campaign for hours at a time (and here mostly* the nuts and carrots are valuable), but cooking raw fish from Fishing into cooked fish is a better use of your time, ingredients and cooking slots than anything else that comes out of cooking. The Nut Feast is one of the only stamina-positive feasts that doesn't fail the stamina-to-slots-taken calculation, and it's also just kinda redundant because feeding the raw nuts is a better use of your time.
Mining is mostly a snake eating its own tail, you get to higher levels so you can get better ore to make better wheels so you can get further in the mine to mine even better ore, for better wheels, etc. There are a couple crafting sets that utilize all the various ore, but once you get tired of making those, well...
lalierre
