Too many if my fellow old time gamers tout that as something "challenging" and wonderful because nostalgia, rose tinted glasses, false memory syndrome.
When Nintendo released the first Zelda cartridge with a built in battery backed memory that saved games, there was much rejoicing. Other games would give you a password when you unlocked the next level so you could start there.
No one liked starting over. Oh, and no one liked water levels.
Prior to "Cake" my newest character was on the second area of Caldwell's Gold and was at VR15. How I got here was during level's 1- 15 on I made sure I had at least 1 item of Armour with the "Exploration" trait (some times more than 1 Armour with that trait) until level 13 or 14 when I noticed I was 4 levels above the area I was in.
I out leveled the zones pretty quickly with out cake.
Cake and Undaunted pledges, Wrothgar daily's got me to VR16 in about 2 days.
Cake also got me 16 CP points during the time it was available.
Currently still in Caldwell's gold second area and everything is VR7 as far as the "base" game.
Don't really stress over those things, and pretty soon, the point will be moot. Opening up skills and skill level per ability is more important to me than over all level of toon. Even in PvP. I worried more about building skill trees with cake than leveling, though I did level pretty good.
"Krist the Lionheart? No. Lionheart was my dog" -Krist "Darling, if looks were everything, I would be king of the world" -Luke
"That place, between day and night, that purple color just before dark, that is where you will find me"- Hughe
The cake rate is not good. Leveling to 50 is too fast. Leveling past that doesn't matter since VR will go away. Perhaps if gear tiers are added near max CP post DB, it would be needed.
I agree the first character leveled should go through everything. I remembered when the xp 1 to 50 was very good and it was easy to go into the next zone 2 to 3 levels above that zone. Players complained about that and xp was dropped. Doing this on alts should not really be needed as most games have level scrolls so you can skip repeating content you've done 2, 4, or 8 times before.
I enjoyed the cake and it actually brought me back to playing the game and allowed me to level 3 alts from various levels to v1. GW2 had the philosophy that leveling should be easy and allow you to quickly max a class. Because of that I maxed every class and put a lot more hours into that game then this one. Most players these days are casual. They want to log-in and feel they had more time just playing their character then managing their inventory.