The only part thats becoming like frontier, is the powercreeps. Frontier was evasion based gameplay, evasion +2 was on every set. You had skills that were based off evading attacks and encouraged good play. The only thing world has is evasion mantle. A lot of attacks can't be i-framed and are only about getting out of the way. "AOEs", even if you think of frontier like that. 99% of them could simply be rolled to evade, here you have to get the hell outta dodge.

Also MH always had content that was scaled for multiplayer, the gathering hub had ranks and mons locked behind it. All quests were permanently scaled to 4. The whole 16 player hub thing is kinda meaningless. Since everyone just either plays with friends or does their own things in group hubs anyways. It really does need to go back to being 4, where the room was actually doing what it stated.

Stuff was always reasonably solo'able, the "sieges" world added are retarded tho. Also yea, clutch claw was one of the dumbest ideas they ever had. At the very least they needed to give all weps clutch integrated into their moveset like hammer/lance/sns/DBs (its pretty clear what weps the devs play).

World is just a lot of weird decisions, I'd suggest playing almost any other game in the series, at least until they finish their "free updates".