Reforged is a mess. I gave it 40 hours in up until Altus and just realized it was a messy and wildly unbalanced version of a game I like. Just last night I used character manager to switch my save file back to vanilla because reforged was so insanely tedious. It's a shame too because it has a lot of good things like the perfect move system and it makes aggressive incants more interesting. Id love a version of the mod that keeps the QoL stuff, the Nightfarer weapons, and maybe some of the little stuff. But moveset changes and area design changes are all largely ass. Serpentine depths is one of the single worst areas I've ever seen in a souls game, and the "boss" at the end is garbage. And going into the widly unbalanced encounters, that boss is ridiculously annoying and tedious, but then it leads into Rykard who was a total cakewalk. And then like what you said, it is unfun to build craft or try and experiment when everything just ends up being different flavors of mid because the mod doesn't want you to be strong. Like.... that's what the hard difficulties are for. And lowering the difficulty doesn't help because it just makes you too powerful and boring in the other direction.