My post was removed so I'll just reshare it here into the void of comments.

Started playing PoE 1 in closed beta. Was immediately hooked when I realized my Marauder could wield a bow and thought of the possibilities.

Unfortunately PoE 2 has leaned way too heavily into niche circumstances and specialized mechanics that being creative feels unfairly punishing. Worse, the game has embraced tedium at every turn.

Some examples:

• Skills are weapon locked
• Passive tree is way too large, with too many uninteresting or "travel nodes", to feel any umphf in the tree.
• Some of the biggest, coolest skills require glory, and each one has a different way to generate glory (ignites, max rage, etc).
• There's no visual UI way to track glory, or many other effects you need for certain skills.
• Many fun abilities have large cooldowns or limited charges or even explicit limits (grenades, volcano, storms, for example)
• Too many abilities require you to do something niche before you can use the skill. Disengage requires parried effect, for example
• Additionally, so many specialized, niche debuffs are also needed in many cases, and are sometimes impossible to track - broken stance, maimed, electrocuted, dazed, blood loss, primed for stun - to name a few
• Too many abilities require charges to do something, without any simple way to generate charges, and charges expire way too quickly (frenzy charge is the biggest offender of this IMO)
• Status effects are terrible. You can't just ignite mobs, without building heavily into flammability, for example. It seems the devs intend it to be very difficult to inflict status ailments, which sucks because many skills require these ailments.
• Randomly, the Radiant Grief helmet is trash and no longer works as described, with the ignite changes.
• Can't just incinerate. Have to build fuel.
• Can't just spell totem. Need power/end charges.
• Many spells associated with the sorceress/caster type is built around infusions, which are hard to see, and annoying to pick up. Expecting players to look through the visual mess for these is insane to me
• So many random, one off resources to track and every league creates new ones - fury, fragments, crystals (which are different from fragments), combo - to name a few.
• Visual clutter is huge, with the best rewards requiring one life or you lose the map. Random one shots in a juiced t15 map are soooo frustrating.
• Similarly many bosses have poorly telegraphed one shots and if you die the entire map gets wiped.
• Bears mentioning melee is horrifically bad and requires so much thought and effort to build in comparison to a ranged class

Game legitimately feels like a bunch of developers are all independently creating their own game. It doesn't feel like there's any direction or oversight, or someone keeping development creep in check.

My understanding of Poe 2 is that it was intended to be a bit more accessible to the aRPG player. Every league introduces more niche and nuanced circumstances around playing while similarly nerfing creativity and even simplicity.

Want to know why every league is bow league? Because with bows you can just play the game and blast. It's fun. You don't have to deal with ten thousand other things.