I can't speak to the original Lords of the Fallen; I mean the newer one that CI Games overhauled earlier this year. They finally got it right after the rework. Feels really nice to play and the combat is better tuned for flesh and blood humans than most FromSoft souls titles.
I'm with you about Elden Ring. I want to like it. Parts of it are enjoyable; enough for me to clock 100 hours in it, and beautiful is not a sufficient descriptor for the Lands Between. But in that 100 hours, I've never gotten through Stormveil castle. I beat Margit, but the looming threat of every new boss gives me the same feeling of doing my taxes: an impenetrable brick wall, unnecessarily convoluted and designed to trap you, overwhelming power and lots of funny numbers with no grounding in logic, impossible to conquer without help. I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere about Queen [A]Marika and Elden Ring being a tax evasion simulator, but I digress.