@Apos: I used to be in FM but not now. There's 2 ways to look at it, just like real life investment.

Farming = Makan gaji. No hope of getting rich. Your effort is in direct proportion to the time you devote to it. And everybody has limited time (24 hours a day). So, how to do you magnify that?

Using AH = Of course there's a cost. But this upfront cost can be regained later as you craft items to sell back out. This is akin to doing business. The boon of this is that you could multiply your efforts leveraging on AH supply and not just your time. But this takes some skills instead of just bulldozing your way through. You need to know supply and demand... and generally buy cheap sell higher.

For levelling, either you use RAF or if that's not available, try to use BOA and join a lvl25 guild. It's pretty fast. Also depending on what class you have, dps classes will generally level faster. I did warlock in fairly quick just by questing and occasional dungeoning. I just run around dotting up stuffs and let me voidlord taunt them.

Other than that, you just have to have a mindset that once your toon reached max level, you'd wanna play it to be an OP toon. Once you have a target set, the road is much easier and tolerable.

Not sure if I made it clearer or just muddled it up further...