You can only craft ascended materials once per day

You can just buy the crafted material with gold. Using your daily craft doesn't mean it's free, because you are losing the gold that you would have gained by selling it. Look up opportunity cost.

farming gold is most effective via daily achievements,

Not even close to true. The most effective is ab multimap and silverwastes chests.

world bosses only spawn at specific times,

World bosses has nothing to do with character progression. It sounds like you aren't really that familiar with this game.

The only meaningful progression in GW2 is horizontal progression towards cosmetic skins

I've just outlined how there is a massive vertical progression in the form of the ascended armor and infusion gold sink.

no amount of real money spent will ever give you the slightest edge in PvP,

Is WvW not pvp now? Because gearing up for WvW is the same as it is in PvE.

If you're not into grinding, T3 and T4 fractals are not for you.

T4 fractals are the most challenging and therefore fun content in the game and they are limited to people who have paid the large amount of gold it costs to gear up. It has nothing to do with whether you enjoy grinding, it's whether you enjoy playing fun content in MMOs. The rest of the game is pretty much just mashing 1, only in t4 and raids do you actually have to pay attention to game mechanics.