[tangent]
Seeing as half of your bar skills are bound to the weapon you're using, you really need to have most of your class's arsenal on hand to get past that feeling.
With my ranger (first character and main) I played through most of the open world content with shortbow/longbow with some greatsword on the side; while this was a perfectly functionable loadout, I wasn't really having fun with the combat until I added [shortsword, dagger/warhorn/torch] and [axe, axe] loadouts; having all of those extra skills available for switching up relieved a lot of the tedium I was experiencing with combat. There may be an "optimal" loadout for maximum DPS, but using that loadout all the time is boring as hell.
In addition to this, coming up the pipeline for future combat updates, ANet is planning on adding additional (utility?) skills for sideways progression.