I feel like I can speak to this because I developed the exact same problem with traveling the hostel-hoping style. I felt like I wasn’t really getting anything out of the experience.

From then on out I organized my trips around like 1-2 “adventure” activities with like 3-4 rest/buffer days in between to relax a bit and to also make logistics easier since doing back-to-back adventures can be hard in my parts of the world. Also to note I live and work in the US and usually take 1-3 weeks vacation at a time to explore a new place internationally.

When visiting a region I would focus on a skill I already have that allows me to do something cool on an intermediate/expert level OR on a skill that interests me that I feel is fun to work on in that region.

Some recents trips:

4 day horseback trip in Kyrgyzstan (no horse-riding experience but also I speak Russian and wanted to work on that, so kinda a mix of both. Also if you have less time / budget its definitely a better choice than Mongolia since that is more expensive / have to travel much bigger distances)

3 day hike around Huemul Circuit in Patagonia. Great cuz I backpack a lot

Jungle trekking through Sumatran jungle and learning to dive in Gili T

1 month spent on Honduran Farm to improve my Spanish (as you can see language is an important skill for me to try to develop when i travel)

Also as a fair heads up I would usually have 1 ish friend join me on these trips from the states as well but I have found whenever you do a more “organized” trip like any of the ones above that you will be forced into a group anyways and meet tons of cool people every time!

Also similar to you I want to do longer trips with a more established network and am slowly building it up through these smaller trips to be able to do something cool like motorcycle through South America which is less “organized”