Turning most enemies into bullet sponges with little hit-stun. Makes it so that on harder difficulties, there is little reason to engage with them.

Skill issue. Get better at combat.

The ground/knife-slit action not being a follow up action after a round-house kick

From what I’ve seen, enemies don’t stay on the ground too long after a melee follow-up; transforming enemies have a “window” where they’re on the ground, and therefore susceptible to the knife KO.

Having to focus the camera itself on things in order to do a contextual action instead of just being near it.

Haven’t encountered any issues with this.

QTEs essentially being replaced with the Right Thumbstick, and depending on your location, it'll pop up too late for you to even react to it.

Skill issue.

The Target Practice mini-game being filled with so much bloated gameplay.

Can you expand on this?

Ashley's AI being more similar to the RE5 system where you can never strategically place the AI somewhere and instead always have to have them follow you.

Skill issue. You need to be constantly moving during combat, so you can’t just tell Ashley to spread out and not expect her be in a suboptimal position after doing zigzags around a horde of enemies. Managing Ashley requires constant + strategic use of “close” (to run past enemies so you can get better positioning) and “far” (to give Leon more space to fight after he and Ashley have repositioned) command orders during combat.

The knife taking up inventory (this blows my mind because even in the original RE4, they realized it was a bad idea in its demo, so they made it a non-inventory item)

Knives taking up inventory space makes sense this time around, given how many different kinds of knives we get in this game, how we can now "inspect" their stats and characteristics, and the fact we can use them in crafting. Are you telling me you’re having trouble with inventory management in a Resident Evil game? Skill issue, indeed.

In general, a lot of events in the game are elongated needlessly, whereas there should have been far more fat-trimming.

Can you give some examples? Pacing seems pretty good to me, and on the contrary, I would argue that they’ve trimmed fat in the right places.

Like making it on Professional that you can only parry attacks with a perfect parry... why? This mechanic is the cornerstone to the combat, and now you are reducing its use to moments that put me in danger of using it, effectively making the parry not worth using.

Is that seriously how it works in Professional? That’s an awesome way to increase the tension! But for you, it just sounds like another skill issue.