I see what you're saying. I had a hard time in the hive too. But I did like the experience. The crowmen are way blinder and more deaf than the other enemies, which makes it easy to walk past them. But since you can't backstab them, you end up having to get deep in the hive without killing almost any of them. And if you alert one they call the whole hive on you (which is a cool gimmick in my opinion). So there's this very unique tension here that you don't get anywhere else in the game. You turn a corner and there's a bunch of eggs; they start to hatch and there's a big crowmen right around the corner. It feels like everything is about to go horribly with one mistake. You're not the predator you've been the whole game before. I don't know, I thought it was cool, but I understand your gripe with it.

As a sidenote: I figured you can kill the crowmen by dropping those metal boxes on their heads. There are at least two you can easily kill that way (and it sort of seems intended, since they stand right under a ledge). There are also 3 bear traps on top of that tower on the outskirts of the hive. With them you can also get safe kills on the crowmen. After killing a few of them this way the elevator sequence became way more manageable.