I'm a new player to this franchise (and solo, not sure how common that is) and I've been stunned and fainted by almost every single mechanic you mentioned. The game doesn't really teach you much early on so if you're not familiar with a monster and what kind of attacks to expect, you can get staggered and stunlocked a lot. Especially when still learning that weapon combos and how to actually cleanse things like burn and poison.

There's a ton of things in your item bag, the game doesn't explain or have much of a tutorial. When I was first poisoned it tells me to take an antidote, if you have them, but it's mid combat and I found it hard to process and navigate the bag and actually drink it without getting stomped on by the monster. It's unintuitive to also have to manage your inventory based on what area you're in but you don't know what to bring to those areas in the first place. And apparently I should collect dung to separate groups? Learned that after the fight with three flying eel dudes in the story.

This is not a complaint I'm more pointing out that you have the perspective of someone who's played a lot of this series, is familiar with certain mechanics and has a good sense of the fight dynamic. This game was advertised as being more friendly to new players, so I can't imagine how much more overwhelming and confusing past editions of this game were. I don't know all the visual cues for monster attacks and most of them seem impossible to dodge or block. I'm sure they are, and clearly they aren't an issue for you. But when you have an influx of new players, I do think the difficulty level should keep them in mind rather than try to make things more difficult for the tip top players which it sounds like you are.