I played the game at launch with my brothers. I got up to VR 10 at the time, but it was an extremely unpleasant slog as we all found the ramp in difficulty to be a bit much. We had trouble soloing most of the content and were forced to group up. That was sort of the intent of veteran ranks, if I remember correctly. They wanted people to group up.
I know things have changed a lot since May. What all have they done since then to make veteran ranks less of a slog?
I never had an issue with how long it took to level up. Doing all of the quests in a zone pretty much guaranteed that you would hit the next veteran rank before moving on. The main thing I'm concerned with is difficulty. Is it more viable to do the stuff solo now?