While I agree Warframe has a decade of content to explore, a lot of it is 'grind' and time gate more than 'unique content'
I'd encourage a story skip route to be more like a more fleshed out long form tutorial. To be something like a guided but abridged star chart where crafts required for quest progress don't have a time or material gate. Where the players get exposed only to those mission types really designed as solo-able, maybe even mostly non-defensive mission set (Exterminates, survival, captures, maybe some more guided spy stuff to teach them how to perfect stealth a vault?)
I could point to a very popular MMO with a story skip where the cutscenes in one of their expansion packs would take longer to watch than Warframe would take to play when we talk just about the missions directly required by the quests without a grind. Warframe is a big game with the grind but still smaller than many MMO games in terms of timesinks and content.
I get the reason for a straight skip. After all flipping the database flags for a player is the easier option to develop since it's basically just getting the right boolean values set on the account. I still think a better new player experience (which costing more than this) isn't that unreasonable to develop. If you look at how the new war set a framework in place for a player off the main game grid but still in the game it seems like a better quest flow option could be created in a similar way. Making a platinum based starter pack that guides the players in addition to rewarding the players at the end of this abridged play-through with the gear that would take longer for free doesn't leave a terrible taste in my mouth. But it does require more development work. Ideally though this route could be rolled out into the purely Free New player experience, guideposts and hint audio/quest based mission behavior would do wonders for helping someone new learn more than they get from just the Vor quest.
I get cosmetic money and engagement numbers are what keeps a F2P game like Warframe alive, but I also look at this, the heirloom pack mistake, and several other F2P engagement sins of the last few years and understand why Warframe has driven most of my friends away. Please show that DE is in this for making a good and enjoyable game. I'd rather see more gameplay ideas borrowed than monitization ideas borrowed for DE games. I'm doubting I'll have any interest in Soulframe given what I'm seeing of DE corporate thinking in these recent years.
