As someone who has brought friends into the game by talking about current content and then struggled to keep them playing because we had to do so much to catch them up and also being on other side of the table in FFXIV, I fail to see how this is a bad idea since it's entirely optional.
When I started Warframe during the Plains of Eidolon release, I was fortunate enough to be in a place in my life with too much time on my hands and the overwhelming amount of content was a great to chew through. It also just fits my playstyle as a player. However in FFXIV, I was asked by a friend to play with him and I was so overwhelmed by ARR that I didn't know if I could do it. He offered that I make a 2nd character and get an MSQ skip while it was on sale and we went and did some of the more current stuff together and I had a blast. I went from "oh my god this is a slog" to "okay I can go back to that 1st character and do some MSQ if I want and then swap back if I need a break" and it saved me from quitting the game entirely.
Another way to put it is that there's people who are never going to care about story. I have friends who want to just shoot things and they don't want to do the story at all especially because it's solo. This skip would get them to where I am and maybe (copium) they'd be so intrigued with the story we're doing in Whispers in the Walls that they'd want to go back and do some of the story that they've heard so much good stuff about.
I feel like if it's $15-25, I would be more than willing to skip if I felt like it would help my enjoyment of the game. It isn't even like FFXIV in the sense where I can't go back and play what I skipped or the wild amount of money you have to pay to even play Destiny 2 and half of the story is not even available. Keeping the price high enough to be a mild deterrent (since people don't want people just skipping to skip) but also being low enough (It would cost as much as Hollow Knight if it was around $15) to not be unreasonable to spend on a game you wanna try, if that makes sense.
Plus we already have little pay to skips by just outright paying plat to get warframes without doing the quest or the content they come from. I know plenty of people who bought Atlas, Styanax, or Khora because they just didn't wanna do the quest or farm.
