I love steams game metadata. I wish I could enable it for non steam games. Regarding shaders - I turned off precaching as it was taking gigabytes of space that I needed. I haven’t noticed a difference in game load time compared to my friends who still have it enabled.
For me it wasn’t about the leveling or end game content. It was the engagement - you had to interact with other players, negatively or positively, to truly progress. Then they added dungeon finder and for all I know the other four players could be bots for all the engagement you get.