Semantics. For all intents and purposes they are all tasks the player can choose to complete for a reward packaged in different ways. If you must have the beginning and ending of a task involve talking to an NPC in order to call something a "quest" then that's fine for you. As for killing 50 animals that just occurs naturally over the course of a playthrough. Whoever said you must go out and spend the next 3 hours doing nothing but killing animals to grind that job to completion all at once? Just play the game and one day, a few weeks in, you'll get the notification that the job is done. In that way it is a fun reminder of what you've accomplished over time. You're just killing your own fun by thinking you have to accomplish it all at once to the exclusion of any other activity getting bored with the tediousness of doing that one thing....
Again, it isn't meant to be accomplished all at once. That one might not happen until much later in the game and probably not at all until you read the book that increases your chances of getting gold, silver, and diamonds. Who would load up the game simply to try and finish that job all at once?
Explain how having Rekt tell you to craft/gather/kill/mine A, B, C, D, and E is any more or less fun and questy than the current achievement chains telling you to craft/gather/kill/mine A, B, C, D, and E especially since if you visit Rekt after doing them either way he is going to give you a reward for completing it? You really need a digital character with text speech telling you to do those things for it to suddenly be a fun quest rather than a grindy achievement? It is the same thing and I have no doubt you would complain about having to kill 50 animals whether Jen told you to do it or whether it appeared on an achievement screen....
Silly? They give you the quest when they are awake during the day and you do the quest at night when they are asleep. Inconvenient for someone trying to rush the quest system, I'll agree, but not silly. If TFP makes the traders open 24/7 then so be it, I wouldn't complain because who doesn't like more convenience but it definitely isn't silly for them not to.
I partially agree. I hope we do have those tasks added in some form whether it be the acheivement tasks or trader tasks but I would also like a variety of new experiences and I don't really care how it is presented. It could be something the trader tells me to do or something the achievement screen tells me to do. It's all the same thing.