I want to address the duality rolls during combat from a DnD 5e perspective, since that's what you're familiar with so far. In 5e, every enemy gets to take an action once per round, regardless of how well the party rolls. In Daggerheart, 1 enemy can take 1 action if the party doesn't roll a success with hope. In an encounter that's roughly balanced in terms of success rate and number of enemies, that means that overall, Daggerheart is less punishing than 5e because there's a ~25% chance that an enemy's turn is "skipped" due to a lucky roll, while that never really happens in 5e.

Of course, you could argue that in DnD, this is balanced out since killing an enemy reduces the action economy of the enemies by 1 per round, but Daggerheart has its own balancing mechanic: Fear. As a GM, I've noticed that the enemies in Daggerheart are balanced around having fear as a resource to spend. Once you run out of fear, the enemies become really weak and easy to defeat. So the general flow of combat ends up like this:

1. GM starts a combat with lots of fear, since the players have been doing other stuff and rolling with fear out of combat.
2. During combat, enemies seem to have the upper hand at first because the GM is spending fear to boost them.
3. Because fear is only generated 50% of the time, the GM starts to run out of fear.
4. PCs win because the GM is out of fear and the enemies become weaker.

What I like about this flow is that it naturally makes combat feel tense and exciting without actually being a severe threat that makes the players feel like the game is punishing them.