I thought I'd try GW2 after years of not playing (last I played was PoE era, bounced off fully before Icebrood saga) and finally managed to get into it!

I used to live and breath this game and while I was not what you'd call "hardcore" player, I knew about everything going on. Now I'm totally in the black which is weird. I try not to get it to me, I just play through the Icebrood saga story now and try my best not to open inventory and achievement tabs etc to not get discouraged. GW2 was always a bit convoluted, but with so much added in the meantime, it's much.

How do you deal with this? What would be your recommendations for me to "ease into it"? What should I engage after getting my groove back in the story? How to dip my toes slowly into buildcrafting? What new systems should I check out?

Bonus question: would you expect the xpacs to go on sale anytime soon? Next one should be around the corner by now, no?

There was this legendary comment on reddit to a thread asking people what would their plan be if they were immortal and got milion dollars, but there was a superintelligent immortal snail also with milion dollars who would want to kill them. I was trying to find it but as far as I can tell OP removed it. Does anyone here have it and could post it here by any chance?

So with open source software more on my mind lately I was wondering - while I get the benefits of transparency and such, how safe is it? If the source code is available to all, isn't it easier to breach for people (like the recent cookies hack)? If I'd have an open source password manager, would it be easier for people to get my passwords somehow than if I use something not open source? Do I just not understand how software works in general?

And what are other benefits that may be not so obvious to someone not so knowledgable about this?

Edit: thank you all for really insightful answers! Among other things I also learned just how much I don't know :)