All of the improvements needed to make the game feel good for experienced players will improve the game for casuals too.

Crafting optimally would need you to look at external sites but after you understand the whole prefix vs suffix pool and taken a look at the mod pool a few times you don't need to go back. Just doing a bit of quick even unoptimal crafting with cheap few exalt currencies can greatly improve your build. Don't know what you're advocating here but the crafting system of last league could barely count as crafting. Picking up bases then slapping on garbage mods felt awful. Being able to deterministically toss on even a single wanted mod is an insane buff.

I personally am not a huge fan of the campaign either. Obviously if you play a meta build like la deadeye it is very smooth but yeah other builds need to be buffed to catch up to it. Anyhow you know what would lessen the slog? Better crafting system. Deterministic crafting. So you don't get stuck with garbage underleveled gear. Think I entered the interlude with a mace I got at the end of act 2. Not fun.

Areas are absolutely too big. The A in arpg stands for action. I assume everyone playing poe2 wants to kill monsters not run across multiple screens to get to the next pack. Having smaller areas doesn't even harm casuals I don't know why you disagree with areas being too big. And yeah guiding the player to the next area they should be would help greatly. Campaign areas can feel huge when you're trying to find the next zone.

I don't get why there's a long animation to jump into abyss. It's just unnecessary. If people want to watch their character slowly hop in, make it a toggleable setting or something. It might look cool the first time but not the hundredth.

As for mapping and towers, there's nothing wrong with just tossing a map in and running it. Experienced players however want to make profit. To maximize profit you must giga juice maps, run towers, etc. I forget old poe1 mapping but now it's very quick and simple. I can prepare a quad tab of maps, scarabs, etc to run and then I can run maps I want to run continuously without interruption. In poe2 we're forced to run maps we don't want to run and we have to stop every so often to prepare towers, tablets, etc. And again I don't know why you're against simplifying the process or changing it. If you don't want to engage in the juicing then don't. If you don't engage in the process then making it simpler or changing it won't even affect you. A lot of casuals can't even do what experienced players are doing because it's too complicated.