You are not forced to do it.
When ‘You don’t have to play.’ is the answer, it means pretty bad things for the game in question.
And you are ignoring my post.
You don’t need to have a single piece of Ascended armor in order to do lvl 50 Fractals, seeing as you can get more than enough AR from simply upgrading the infusions in your rings.
And since you claim to love fractals you shouldn’t have much issues getting more then enough infusions to upgrade them quite high without having to spend more gold than you earn.
It is generally best to ignore strawman trolling arguments. But let’s follow this bit of nonsense to it’s end anyways.
The ideal goal would be 70 AR. You make the claim that you can ‘simply’ get there just from Infused rings. So we are looking at 5 AR on each of them from standard infusions, leaving 60 to go. That means you are looking for +30 Agony Infusions. The cost for the Thermocatalytic Reagents alone for each +30 Agony Infusion is over 8 million gold. This is ignoring the cost to get over five hundred million +1 Agony Infusions.
So let’s look for something a bit less trollish and at least closer to reality. Such as full ascended trinkets, infused back and rings. From the standard +5 Infusions you can hit 30 Agony Resistance, leaving 40 to go with three Agony Infusion slots. Getting +13 Agony Infusions isn’t as absurd as +30’s at least. But you are still looking at 4,096 +1 Agony Infusions for each of them. This is far more than you can actually farm on your own, forcing you to go to the Trading Post for at least a portion of them. At 15 silver each, you are looking at 614 gold, and then another 61 and a quarter gold for the Th. Reagents needed to combine them. So 675 gold for each Agony Infusion, and you need three of them. And at the rate that FotM give gold, you are going to be at it for years before you have gathered 2k gold for this.
And now we are back to where we started. The idea of ‘Just use Agony Infusions and you don’t have to grind anything but fratals!’ is absolutely absurd. No matter how you want to break it down, Agony Resistance is a very significant barrier to entry. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing, if there were other enjoyable endgame activities to GW2. But as it stands you have tPvP, WvW, and high level Fractals of the Mist.
And it seems like there are quite a few people who looked at the situation that the OP describes here and decided that the “we don’t make grindy games” MMO that they bought into isn’t really worth grinding up to the point where they could start playing effectively.