Yeah I agree, factioning does kinda suck, but you don't have to do those areas for new stuff if you don't want to do the grind. I pretty much refused to do Tehat factioning except for teh 100 kill in the bigger pyramids because it involves loot and actual crawling isntead of just sitting around mass ae'ing 3 adn 2 dots
Rhaz faction really wasn't that bad if your group pooled the stones/bags to people that needed them. Got mine done in a night.
The new Xennemut dungeon doesn't need any faction as far as i know, except has an access quest. There are some decent loot drops in there, not to mention fun events. It's mostly grey at 50, but they bumped most of the named up to 45 so we wouldn't get TLC'd. (btw, Quinn if you read this, could you let someone know that monks get gimped out of having air brakes on the power suits because it uses energy...which we don't have. I really wish they would let all the devs know that ONE class doesn't get energy so they should stop putting it on reward abilities)
Gorgalok/Ichtakhta/Flordiel does involve _some_ faction but really not all that much, you just have to be non kos to get the quests, and you can collect armor bits while getting that faction so its no where near as bad as Marsh of Peril crap was. And if you are sneaky, you don't even need to be non-kos to get the armor quests heh, haven't tried turning any in at kos yet tho

So really, while I agree, faction grinding like Tehat sucks, not all of it does, you just have to explore your options. And to make it better, skip around from night to night, that way you don't get burnt out on any one area
