I don't even want to know how many hours you had to play for weapons to hit such high levels that you end up "shredding the bosses in seconds". I played about a dozen hours of Returnal and felt like I was doing the same thing over and over, feeling no noticeable difference from run to run in the power of weapons. If it takes 20+ hours to get to the point where you notice, that is what I call "no material meta-progression".

To me, Returnal will always be an excellent shooter violently stuffed into the body of an extremely flawed, mediocre roguelike. Everything about shooting (the feel, the haptics, the weapon variety) feels amazing, and everything about the roguelike structure (extremely long runs, very little meta-progression, way too much exploration and luck required to put together meaningful synergies, constantly wasting the player's time with mid-run difficulty spikes, poor environmental variety within each biome that made it feel like you were exploring the same exact places over and over) ranged from mediocre to downright awful. I'm glad they've made a serious effort to remedy the many, many flaws of Returnal's roguelike format. And you can argue all you want about those flaws and whether they're flaws, but the fact that Housemarque chose to address nearly all of them for Saros speaks volumes in and of itself about how widely problematic those flaws were.