The reason I think it's intrusive is because you could mine your entire hearthling's life, but never be a miner, because the quests are too clunky and don't flow well with normal game play, so my idea is a way to fix that.
Make it so to complete a credo, you fill a progression bar as you do what your credo entails. Got the farming credo? Plant and harvest crops. Pearldiver? Collect mussels and go for long swims. Make it so normal game play affects your progression within the credo and make it so that it takes longer to fill this progression bar the more credos you have previously completed. This isn't to say to do away with the quests either, the quest objectives should stay, but instead provide bonuses to fill the progression bar faster. There are a lot of ways this could be implemented and twisted, but as long as normal game play affects credo progression, I think that'll clean up the system as a whole.
Tl;dr: Allow the normal hearthling grind to help us progress our credos, while making the quests sub objectives instead of mandatory ones.







