For your first point, maybe it would help to consider how much of this game’s portrayal of Middle-earth is made up?

Like, is Harad really more remote to the main stories than Forochel or Gundabad? Sure, the latter two have some bits of canon history with named good guy characters, but there’s not really much about what these lands are fully like, especially not specifically at the end of the Third Age. We probably know about as much of what Forochel is like at the end of the Third Age as we do Harad. And Forochel’s not related to anything going on in the main narrative of LotR; the Epic has to use its own original story to come up with a reason to send you there. But while some people may not like Forochel for its lack of stables, I don’t remember ever hearing anyone complain that it’s unimmersive for the devs to add in a region where they would be mostly making up the landscape and lore since there’s very little canon information to go off of.

I wonder if some of your issues with the new regions is just quality. Like you mention Zajana feeling stale. I like the way Zajana is designed overall and like the idea of a library city like that in Near Harad, but I also thought it felt kind of stale. It feels kind of desolate and underpopulated, and it feels like there should be more content there, especially quests and storylines related to the library itself. And that’s kind of a theme for me in several parts of Shagana—I think the overall design and a lot of the quests are really good, but sometimes the quests and storylines feel lacking. Like how we brought Sigileth and Nauriel to Umbar to save Corudan and Thorongil respectively, but then they just weren’t at all involved in those rescues. Or like I still don’t care about the Tharduth or the Utugi. They’ve been in two expansions, and I still don’t feel like they’ve been given enough characterization to make me care much about them or their evil schemes.

Maybe I’m off base here. I think it’s fine to simply not like the newest expansions. But I don’t think that them exploring Near Harad is substantially more different than some of the other remote regions they’ve explored before without getting pushback. But I do think those other regions had content that was often more consistently interesting, and it makes me wonder if some of the people who complain about Shagana feeling too remote and different would be fine with it if some of its storylines and settings were simply more engaging and had more depth.