First of all, I would like to voice my support for the OP. Even though I have picked the game for different reasons than you, I totally share your feeling about how recently content has moved away from what I used to enjoy doing. These days, I basically just log in for a few quick dailies to keep in touch and somewhat prepare for future content that might suit me better.
Secondly, I wish to add my two cents about the reasons why this has turned out to be so: Generally speaking, I do no longer feel that a casual play-style is being welcomed. While I do not personally consider myself to be a casual player, I nevertheless picked GW2 over other MMOs for this. Prior to HoT, I felt that making progress was possible even with limited playtime. Dailies gave extra rewards, open world-bosses and even instanced content such as dungeons were easily accessible even to less dedicated players. As far as I can tell, HoT changed all this for the worse:
- Overlong meta-events in the new maps: Staying in a map for 2h+ is just not accommodating enough for me. On the average work day, I would pretty much have to decide to play a meta-event (which happens on a fixed timer) only. Not gonna happen. I understand that this is supposed to be changed/improved in the future, but there is currently no eta or detailed information.
- Dungeons officially dead: I guess I’m particularly cranky over this cause it used to be the activity I enjoyed most. Nevertheless, dungeons were (are?) what I consider to be the perfect concept of handling instanced content. The group size as well as difficulty managed to create a balance between accessibility and still rewarding more capable player. Aka beginners could still complete it or be carried by more experienced players, but it would take more time.
- Fractals were supposed to replace dungeons, but they were somewhat dumbed down in order to make them more accessible. In addition to that, there wasn’t really any new content added. As a result, everyone just speed-runs swap (or a similar selection of short/easy fractal levels). Pretty much hit rock-bottom in terms of enjoyment.
- Raids were hyped like crazy to the masses, yet they are only designed to be for a small percentage of hardcore players. Obvious communication problem aside, there is the whole matter of exclusivity and time-investment that I feel does not belong into a game like GW2. While I have dedicated a lot of effort into wing 1 (and successfully completed it several times), I came to understand that this is not how I wish to spend my valuable play-time.
To sum up, the new meta-events are too long, dungeons are dead, fractals have been slaughtered and raids are not for me. As such, there is simply nothing left in terms of PvE (… and PvP and WvW can’t make up for that by a long-shot). With the direction the game has been taking since HoT, I highly doubt that the upcoming LS3 will somehow magically change all this.
Lastly, this post got longer than I intended to – not meant to hijack the thread or anything, just wished to add a perspective similar to the one the OP describes: A veteran player no longer feeling welcome in the game.