As a "casual" player myself, it's a big hard no from me. I'm level 20 and have 83 million influence (mixture of selling stuff I crafted, running missions/TFs, converting merits to things I could sell in the auction house). I'm really not in any hurry to get purples either.
I played on live and always enjoyed the Hollows. It always felt like a rite of passage to traverse the zone and avoid mobs without travel powers. 😄
Just a correction to an earlier post - it was 7 years between the Hollows being released and travel powers (fly/sj/ss/tp) being available at level 4. In all that time I personally do not remember any "uproar" about being able to travel through the zone.