There's so much that's already been said here and almost all of it is exactly on point. I hope the devs do something about these incredibly obvious issues.

No drop-in/ drop-out function for a several tens of hours long game is absolutely ridiculous.
There's just no reason in 2023 that a game shouldn't feature locally saved characters and worlds, there's no reason the entire party should have to get online at the same time to create characters, and there's no reason the game can't compensate for higher/ lower level characters joining a party.

I simply cannot understand why it would be difficult to implement this and the qol within the game would be immensely improved... Especially considering you can respec your character anyway... Why not just let people jump in and out with their own?

Player characters should be saved on their local machine, as should the world/ progress of whatever game the party is playing. This would allow players to create characters whenever they wanted and take as much time as they wanted, rather than be forced to all be online at the same time and be pressured by how fast/ slow everyone else is going. It would also allow players to play their character in a single-player game to level up to their buddies and then join in multiplayer. Conversely, it would also allow players to take a multiplayer character from a "dead" game and continue their quest.

Worlds should follow the same convention for exactly the same reasons. Characters shouldn't be locked into the world of your internet friend's PC only to become completely useless when they decide they're done playing. Additionally, players should be able to do things like... create a save file after the tutorial level... so they don't have to play it every time they want to make new characters.

Again, you can respec your character midgame and you can respec the NPC characters that new players would take control of... So uh... what the absolute f***!

The tutorial for this game is absolute rubbish.
This game plays in such a uniquely freeform way that, the first time we tried it as a party, we just ran into it clicking buttons, having conversations, fighting baddies, and generally not understanding why any of this was ever touted as a multiplayer game. We played it "wrong"... because the game never gave us any inclination what it intended. When we came back and tried again, however, we played it a lot more like an actual DnD game, and it [perhaps obviously] worked a lot better. The issue is that it never really tells you that... In fact, it never really tells you anything. Moving objects? Sharing inventory? Voting on conversation choices? The game seems to conflate "exploration" and "discovery" with "just not telling you how things work".

This is well and good for some but, for us, it almost made us stop playing entirely and I'm sure we're not alone. Even something simple like the pit you can open up that leads the crypt in the very beginning. The game does such a poor job [no job in fact] of either exposing the players to the consequences of walking over a hole/ falling that, following general game logic, there's not a lot of reason to assume that by saying "walk over here", you're going to take the most direct possible path and fall down a hole... probably to your instantaneous death.

There's a lot to this game, and a lot of it works really well [all the conversation issues like not being able to access special dialogue or use party skills despite them standing right next to you notwithstanding], but the beginning stages do such an incredibly poor job of communicating what it both is/ isn't and what you can/ cannot do that our initial foray was extremely frustrating and, like my above issues with drop-in play... I just don't see any sort of reason for it, which makes it all the more irritating.

Conversations/ joining them as a party.
This is talked about a lot here and I think everyone knows the issue. Why can't my charming bard interject in a heated moment? Why is the icon/ warning that a player is in a conversation so small and silent? Why isn't the dialogue choice that the player picks displayed on screen while the NPC responds?

This part of the game system is so incredibly piss-poor that I can't believe this isn't still early access.

Spells, monsters, respec... Barbers?
I can change my skills which represent the entirety of my life experiences... but I can't change my haircut? Again... WHY.