Yea, the only reason i felt i wanted to be lvl 50 was the ability to at least put up a fight when doing trade runs in the contested/open-pvp zones. However even lvl 50 is not going to help you much as it's usually a group that will attack you.
So for the most part, you can do anything you want in the "safe" zones at any level. There are definitely people that opt to avoid PvP and you'll see them constantly in the low level zones doing their stuff there.
The main thing that you need to take into account with this game:
1. You need LP to craft/harvest/farm/trade run . There's no way around this, you need it , period. The only thing you can do without LP is PvP + Questing (non crafting quests that is).
2. You need land to make real progress with the craft/trading . It is well known that land on most servers are severely limited, if you find an open spot that can fit a small house, you better grab it . The interesting part is all these limits are seriously driving the economy, you can see how there is a market in selling property . It's pretty much a fact that not everyone will be able to get property, and certainly not where they want with all their stuff close together.
So above points implies Patron Status. If you are F2P you will get a fairly good idea what's going on, but i can guarentee you right now, you will rarely have enough LP to go into crafting/trading, certainly not enough to level your character (i spend about 500 LP just to harvest my farm in 1 day, which can easily give me half a level in xp, then i have not even started trade runs, to craft+deliver 3 tradepacks i need 360LP right there) .
So as F2P, you will mostly be questing/leveling to 50 as F2P and this game will feel like a generic WoW clone if you do . If you are lucky, you can share a farm with a patron/guild (i share my farm with the guild for a few F2P to plant their stuff to complete quests).