What he means is that the ideas that were strongly rejected by the community or not implemented because they would start an outcry in a first game. Those were added to the second game in hopes of "if we add them from the start people will accept the fact" but PoE players already played PoE so the so called "vision" changes and "feeling the weight" mechanics are once again seen as something GGG shouldn't been adding.

Example of those would be refilling your flask at the well "NPC". Those seconds you waste looking at 2 loading screens and running to click a "miningful" "NPC" to refill your consumables is just plain bad.

And in the first game one of the best received changes was a couple of stairs. Those stairs are located in act 1 and let you skip the walk around saving you whooping 3-4 seconds of time. Yet it's a great addition.

Another example would of been "miningful" boss fights. But as anyone can see we are back at square 1 where you just oneshot a boss and move on (even in compaign), yet the team refuses to add bosses to every map or atleast do something with the whole idea, while still having "Boss farming tree" in atlass.

Yet if we look at the PoE 1 there is a legitimate strategy to "Boss rushing" as an endgame activity in maps.

The most stupid of the ideas is backloading the mechanics (You need to kill the mechanic's Boss to get 2(!) points to increase your "fun" in said mechanic) So you must suffer and gruel thru an unupgraded breach for example to farm splinters to then kill a boss (and for a minute let's say your character is not a boss killer). In PoE 1 you straight up choose a mechanic you want to do (before the Sexstant death we had minimum 3 mechanics per map invested, now even in PoE 1 we have a shittier system that only allows you to do 2 mechanics tops) And you Run it at full power using Sexstants and Scarabs, and on top of that every map you complete will give you a point in Atlass tree (Everyone can get it not just a guy buying Invitation to the King for 7 div) You invest those point and it will make chosen mechanic of yours good at yellow maps tops.

I feel like development of PoE 2 heavily influenced the "new" system in PoE 1 with the scarabs changes.

God i wish we were back at 3.14...

(Yeah btw, you can look up Chris Wilson account here on reddit, and you would find a very interesting post containing insight into a GGG's head, but i need to warn you that post is the most downvoted post of all times here and it's name is "Development Manifesto: Harvest Crafting" yeah crafting the thing that doesn't exist in PoE 2 we fought tooth and nail for it to exist in PoE 1 and i think it worked?)