Yeah, you are largely correct. I don't play popular MMO's because they are all designed for fast progression. I got in to free-to-play MMO's when I discovered the Korean grind MMO's where the level cap was nearly impossible to reach (due to an exponential curve) and they were free because the grind was so long they expected you to pay money to make it faster. What I discovered was, as long as I never spent any money on anything to speed up the grind, the games were the perfect length. I simply don't ever want to reach the cap in any game ever.
With that in mind, DDO has a nearly perfect system. It does allow you to reach the cap so you can do raids if you want, but then you can TR right back to level one so you can play the entire game again (which is far less boring than only repeating the high level content because you are nearly at cap and working on an exponential curve). Playing each quest once per life makes for the slowest rate of repetition possible, because I literally am playing the entire game 56 times in a row. Most games have you play in the newbie zone once and only for a few hours, but spend years doing content near the cap. Thus you never get to fully enjoy the early content, while the later content becomes far too repetitive.
For me, I seek out games like DDO specifically because of the grind (which I don't view as a grind, but rather satisfying progress that is the result of normal play). Just last night I joined a level 10 ToEE party on mid-reaper even though I was already double capped, because there is more than enough experience in the game and rapidly TRing is not my purpose in playing. Running a few quests for zero exp is no big deal (it's not like we don't all do that at the cap when we play up there). DDO has thankfully become the game I was looking for, but I acknowledge that means the people that want to quickly get to max power so they can do nothing but raid every day are not going to be happy with it. That crowd simply doesn't like the same types of games I do. I need to have something to pursue, other than gear, and they need to know that they have already completed 100% of all available character advancement (which is something I never want to achieve).