I think a lot of previous changes meant to make the game newbie-friendly have done precisely the opposite. Less time "grinding" means casual and less experienced can reach higher levels per time spent on the game. Less exp required means that exp maxing is much less of a problem. Less experienced players can solo their way to 1x because they only need to know about a dozen zones. People take more risks because death is a % of a level, and faster levels means that the time cost of death is much smaller.
However, when you look at second order effects, these changes may have been more harmful than anything. Because so little time and knowledge is required to be level 30, most experienced players will be at 30 for most of the wipe. Because leaders realize this, few will group lower levels when they can help it, meaning that for most people, the multi-player game really doesn't begin until level 30.
Creators also see that people don't spend much time in low-mid zones, so they focus efforts on high end and end game content. Also, the definition of high end has changed somewhat. When level 30 was hard or time consuming to achieve, Storm's Keep was a hard zone. Now that legend is the norm, Storm's is a 2-4 man zone, and a lot of time is spent making new zones or tweaking old ones to keep things challenging for groups of 5-10 level 30s that include multiple legendaries. Unfortunately, part of making zones challenging seems to involve extensive use of caster mobs with spells like prism and pws that make bringing anyone with sub-level 30 hps and saves a huge liability.
Overall, I think it's worth seeing what happens with the return to pre-George Bush exp tables. A few things should be fixed, however.
1) reduce death penalty (especially at lower levels) - One good thing about faster levels was that death was less costly in terms of time, which encourages exploration and risk-taking. Moreover, the absence of experienced friends and groupmates showing the ropes means that less experienced players will actually have to learn more low-mid zones in order to level thanks to mob exp maxing becoming an issue once again.
2) fix warrior issues - Warrior seems like the default template for humanoids. Thanks to most mobs being hasted anyway, this often meant death for the unwary solo player exploring a new zone, even before superbash. Vigor being overpowered means that a major source of exp also takes longer to kill.
3) cheaper ranks - Most people now have a bunch of unspent rank points by level 10, but don't have the cash to use on it. Putting in a set of newbie ranks, with low cash cost but higher RP costs would give people something to do with those points and give casual players another toy to play with at lower levels. The higher RP costs would mean that the purpose of the high cash costs--to discourage people swapping out ranks for every new situation--would largely be preserved. Even with, for example a 1000 coin 3 RP +stat rank to play with early on, everyone will eventually want to save up for the 300 coin 2 rp version.
