@ZyloWolfBane By all accounts Monster Hunter's skill cap has been increased, it's just not one of those obnoxious games that halts progress with prohibitive difficulty. Monster Hunter has been open to different levels of play even going back to Tri — if anyone reading this is unfamiliar, a much pricklier of a pear than recent entries — and if it hadn't been I never would have gotten into it seven or so years ago.
And expeditions don't have to be optimal, they just have let players gather and hunt without a time limit. That said, I was disappointed that monsters flee from expeditions much faster than from normal quest, which kind of defeats the chill hunt aspect of them. Not that the standard 50 minute time limits in World matter to begin with, but it would be nice.
In terms of extended playtimes, in my mind after around 40 or 50 hours of singleplayer (and in World I'm nearing 100 before I've seen the last new monster) everything else is just bonus. RPGs and core Zeldas can run longer, but I don't think they can fairly be expected to, and neither can Monster Hunter. And let's elucidate what we're talking about here: finding new monsters and areas. World still has 100s of hours worth of playtime unlocking all the quests and plumbing the depths of the dynamic fights. With the environments, hazards, new attacks, and new monster animations I feel like fights now have a wider range of outcomes than 4 or even in Tri.
Oh, and that one spoiler monster that shows up in all the areas wasn't my favorite. I think it's a really cool design being a bomber plane where Valphalk was a fighter jet, but it felt awkward to have it show up wherever. It hasn't been anywhere near every high rank quest in my experience, I'm coming at this from the perspective of bomb boi not quite fitting in the Ancient Forest and Rotten Vale. It was probably a volcano monster design that they turned into Jho 2.0 to spice things up.