Am I taking it too seriously or just unrealistically? You tell me. I just would like to be the hero in my own story, game limitations withholding.
The problem is that the writers can’t make even basic assumptions about you as an individual character. The game knows your race, your gender, and some other basic demographic information, and it tracks a fairly-useless personality trait, but that’s about it. There’s no way to tell the game, for example, that Olaf Norndude is a look-before-you-leap type, or that Olga Nornlady shoots first and asks questions later. You can’t tell the game that Olaf is an extrovert and Olga is an introvert. Every player will have ideas about their characters that the writers just won’t know.
That means that the writers have to avoid using any piece of information about your character which they can’t know when designing instances—which is a lot. That’s why you might be able to ask additional questions because you’re a Charr and you understand the importance of warbands in Charr culture, but you don’t get much more (and even then that could be stepping on somebody’s roleplaying, if they’re imagining their character as a Charr who was born outside of Charr culture in one way or another and thus has no idea what a warband even is and shouldn’t even know to ask about them). Even Link in the Legend of Zelda can have more assumed of him than this.
But that’s not the only constraint: the plot also has to be the same for everybody. An MMO has to devote its resources to other things; its forays into branching plots are necessarily limited. The Living Story is even more limited because of its release schedule, but even if there was a traditional-style expansion, there would still be some heavy boundaries. Think of the Personal Story, and how no matter what you did for ten levels or so, you ended up in the same place in the end. Nothing of actual importance is different between any two complete plays of the Personal Story. For a unified lore and history of the world, things have to be like this. The player characters can’t have any actual agency in a situation like this. The writers can, and should, play every trick they have to give you an illusion of agency, but it will always be an illusion.
So if you can’t make the player’s character a “real character” because you don’t know anything about them, and they can’t have any useful effect on the plot due to the constraints of an MMO, savvy players are always going to feel like they’re marginalized in their own stories—because they are. The game world always has to be able to go on without you. You can’t be the same kind of hero you can be in Mass Effect. (Not that Mass Effect did it perfectly, what with a good third of the renegade options being something like “I’m going to do this stupid thing because tee hee evil or something!”)
This isn’t to say that the writers are doing this perfectly. I mean… Trahearne. (Though he isn’t as bad as people make him out to be.) But a lot of things will bug you a lot less if you understand the restrictions on your role in the story.