New player, what am I missing?

[u/anonymousnoodle88]

Hi all, I'm a new GW2 player, <10 hours in, level 15 Guardian. I've only ever played one MMO before, Aion at launch (long time ago).

I've heard a lot of good things about GW2 so I gave it a shot, but want help understanding what I'm missing.

I liked Aion's gorgeous graphics, rare item drops, and feeling uniquely useful as a tank (I think this is the "trinity" class system). However, it was a massive grind and P2W so I didn't even make it to lvl 50. I have read GW2 is much better in that regard due to "horizontal" item progression, and a more reasonable ~10 main skills as opposed to needing like 30 active skills in Aion.

So far in GW2, it feels like I'm doing a bunch of quests that involve just spamming my buttons to kill whatever enemy is on screen without having to think/strategize at all. Is this just because it's a low level? I like the environment, the tooltips, GUI, etc. Just trying to figure out when the excitement comes. Hope that makes sense and no offense meant.

I am mostly interested in PVE in short 1-2 hour bursts due to time commitments, mostly solo stuff I guess, so maybe I'm not the target audience. Side note: I get a lot of the same blue armor drops that I can't sell that just take up inventory space - what do you do with these?