Yeah, it almost completely turned me off, myself. I've had this account since release, but every time I've tried to get into the game, I fell off and couldn't stick with it.
This time around it's been fun and I've been enjoying it. Got all the expansions and all of that. But I will tell you, I almost logged out and said, "screw it." when I found out the cool mount that everybody rides around on from mob to mob can only be obtained through a story segment that I had to pay gems for, so I had to put off farming for for now.
Granted, I do know that it's a huge time sink and it's nothing like just buying the story segments. But I wanted to have it all ready for me to start farming, instead of realizing that I had a bunch of roadblocks I'd need to take care of first and to begin farming gold in earnest before I could even start farming for the mount.