Most people beat the PVE side of the game in 1 - 3 days and the general consensus is that it is nowhere near as good or as long as Chapter 1.
My Canthan-born assassin has 60 hours of age after completing the main missions, and my ritualist has 32 hours - rushed very fast with the 10k "befriending" faction already on account. Neither char has done any Luxon areas, only the Kurzick side (so they're missing about a quarter to third of the explorables.) These times include elite skill capping, tagging all areas, and a moderate amount of exploration on the assassin. The Asn has mapped 66,1% and the Rit 55,2%.

I'd guesstimate that entirely new players will take around 80-100 hours on their "first time through", but veterans will of course do it in much less time. They have resources such as friends, guilds, knowledge and raw playing skill that newer players do not.

About PvE being not as good, I guess it depends. I like the increased difficulty, Factions has a nice tendency to punish for mistakes like sloppy aggroing and positioning. The end-game areas of Factions - the elite missions - have very good rewards, my guildmates made about 1 million gold each over a few completions of the Luxon elite mission.

As for PVP being amazing: I got rank 9 in December of last year (which means I did a whole lotta PVP) and personally I found PVP gets very boring after that. After you get rank 9 you don't really get any more worthwhile rewards for doing PVP hence it is highly pointless.
I'm still not rank 9 (missing a couple hundred fame), and I play PvP even more than you did. I'm in a top 20 guild though. I agree with you that Heroes' Ascent is boring (even before rank 9... ), it's mostly cookie-cutter flavor-of-the-month fame farming and stupidly defensive holding builds, and leaves much less room for tactics and strategy than GvG does.

And point about PvP... is the game itself IMO. People don't play games like Counter-Strike, Starcraft or Total War because of in-game rewards, but because they like it. GW is one of the most demanding team games out there, with good if not great balance and a large playerbase.

And waiting around for a team to form is a huge pain. Waiting for 8 good players to assemble onto a PVP team together often literally takes hours of sitting around doing nothing.
Guild, guild, guild. Friendlist. And alliance.