I'm sure there's a reason for it all, but the game never really tells you.
I've found that talking to scouts gets you a bit more of the story and helps tie things together, plus it gives you more of a path through zones instead of just bouncing around. I got a bit bored with my Asura around level 15 and couldn't find the last heart in the starting zone so I started talking to scouts again and realized I'd been missing a bit of explanation and setting. It's not a lot more, but it helps.
Also: giant fire monster boss in the noob zone that one-shots you with about 1/4th a second warning to dodge (and often nowhere to dodge anyway because there's fire everywhere)? not cool anet.
The fire elemental is bullshit. I would almost never say that about a challenge in a game (heck, bring on Dark/Demon Souls or whatever you want to throw at me, I can handle difficult when it comes down to it), but it's true about that boss. I can't even tell where all the fire comes from. Should we be focusing on killing the flying things it summons really quickly? Or can we just have them focus on someone and have them go run in circles for a while? There's a stun/knockdown that lasts a good 4 or 5 seconds and lava pools that get summoned constantly, so there's a very good chance you're going to get knocked down by one of the fireballs that have an ~1/2 second window to dodge and then have lava spawn on top of you, which downs you before you can get up. And then more lava spawns on you which kills you while you're downed. And then the flying things chase the rest of the people out of the room, where they trap you at the bottleneck with constant knockdowns and pools of lava. Oh and let's not forget the random little fire trails the boss itself shoots out along the ground. They're not hard to dodge on their own, but oh, what's that? You're surrounded by lava and flying things? Too bad.
The rewards were decent, but not worth the 2 silver (about 10-15% of the money I had at the time) I spent on repairs and the time I spent running back over and over. Also, it doesn't help that the closes waypoint can be besieged by random events which prevents you from using it to respawn.
Blarg.