The "1999" expansion coming up seemed promising, 
I've always known Warframe is like an asteroid belt of content updates where each asteroid floats somewhat independently of one another but trying to put it together is actually discouraging me from diving in.
I see stuff that sounds very cool, like some new fancy way of upgrading my old Bo Prime to be a stat stick of increased sprint and bullet jump, but then its like "oh you have to go to yet another grindy hub and collect a lot of stuff and probably do daily leveling tasks with local rep" which was what eventually made me set the game aside; during The New War that part with the mandatory Necramech sequence was such a story-momentum-stopping bottleneck (because I didn't have a Necramech and I didn't do the grinds necessary to get one because I hated that particularly goopy and unpleasant hub area) that I paid some real money, got a quick and dirty Necramech unlock, and only then completed it, felt tired... and logged out for years.
Also, as silly as it may sound, the notion of "feeding" my old Warframes to the Helminth to min-max my action bar felt so whiplash-like counter-intuitive to everything my Operator's story had built up to at that point that the decision to stop logging in was partially pushed by that once that was the new hotness content.
I remembered this resonating with me:
"...We had created monsters we couldn't control. We drugged them, tortured them, eviscerated them... We brutalized their minds... but it did not work, until they came... And it was not their force of will, Not their void devilry, not their alien darkness... It was something else. It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.''
And now it's "ah naw, go get fed into the talking tumor, I want a better action bar." 
I guess my question is this: where does an old veteran even start with the avalanche of new content? Is it all rep grinds from content asteroid to content asteroid from here on? As silly as it may be to ask: is it still fun?
We got a new creative director after new war who's making tons of QOL improvements and reducing content islands. Whatever you liked doing before? Just keep doing it. Standing grinds have been practically decimated. Duviri is the only new content you really need to worry about. the new quest is confusing as hell but the content itself is pretty straight forward. also recommend unlocking steel path and playing some zariman too
Zariman is fun, took me a while to get my head around that and Duviri when I came up after a hiatus since they'd dropped Solaris. Stiiiiiiiiiiiiill kinda miffed they actually did something about debt-bond drop rates after I finished that faction grind, but eh. Also digging heavily on chasing liches, at first I was doing it for the ephemera drops, but their personalities are funny.
well, the Solaris thing is hindsight I suppose.
Pretty much. I am happy that newer players who choose to do the open world faction grinds will have to spend less time grinding those out; as charming as the Solaris workers are, Fortuna itself can get old quickly if you engage with every method of leveling it. Good change overall, I'm just kicking myself a lil about it lmao.