Not having fun

The difficulty of PoE2 is certainly ramped up from PoE1.. especially when starting from scratch with scrub gear. I died several times to The Devourer, simply because bad RNG on drops.. and the crazy mouse movement mechanic making you walk around like your trying to pass a sobriety test while inebriated.

Thankfully I went a couple zones deeper, and was able to finally get some better drops and craft those whites so they didn't suck as badly.

not so fun for me because i didn't expect to be so difficult from the beginning.
i prefer poe1 progression where i could enjoy the campaign with a slower progression

I gotta agree with the OP. Maybe the wording is 100% accurate but I share the same sentiment. For reference, I'm playing witch and using mostly the occult spells. I use mouse for movement and casting.

So some easy bits: trying to move while channeling cancels the channel. The minions are basically non-existent, especially in bossfights. So you're stuck with spamming essence drain, which then decides to fire in different directions rather than the one the mouse is pointing out. I missed pointblank casts while namelocked. This kind of stuff is highly annoying in of itself but the way the game works aggravates the issues.

The enemies feel too spongy, too much is required to get rid of a normal mob that is at the same level as the character. And at the same time even the white mobs have the ability to combo a player to death with 3-4 attacks which is not a lot. Bosses take this to a completely different level: you deal about 3% of their hp every attack and they oneshot you if you miss a roll.

When you try to do contagion + essence drain combo the one target affected will sprint out of the pack at speeds the player can only dream of, meaning you don't get the contagious transfer. Unearth and bonestorm don't have any kind of synergy as far as I could see and the minions don't really exist when fighting bosses.

All this doesn't really make the game hard either, it just makes it tedious. You're tediously moving through the obstacles, you need to move methodically and slowly so you don't get absolutely murdered by some random white pack. You need to play like your minions are not there (because they typically aren't). And because there's no form of movespeed, if you've missed an exit that had a boss you needed to kill you need to jog your ass all over the map trying to find it.

And it was fairly quickly that I realized, this isn't fun; this is boring. They brought the worst of Dark Souls to this game and didn't think about how it would impact the flow of this game. Every blue and yellow feels like a boss in of itself, and by boss I mean a massive sponge that just wastes time.

They didn't consider the class balance to the extent they should: if you're giving enemies means of dealing with a ranged character, like a leap or a teleport or godlike movement speed, then the player needs to have similar defenses to a melee because the range is simply not a factor anymore.

As for the point where I just didn't want to go anymore: the sanctum trial. If there was something I truly loathed about the original PoE, it was that blasted sanctum. But at least I didn't have to play that garbage. Now I'm pretty much forced to and I really don't want to. I don't want to deal with a ~10 stage health meter that simply does not refill. I am aware there's places where you can get some honor back but I just don't want to deal with it. Again, no matter what other people do there, for me it simply is not fun.

All in all, this game needs rebalance all over. The damage is too much in favor of the monster and there's no means for players to produce reasonable levels of damage. There's no means of skipping content the movement and the gameplay is all too tedious.

I must disagree, although it's my personal opinion, not forcing it on you. I feel like the difficulty is on point - hard, but not too hard. I needed 2 or 3 tries to beat some bosses on a monk (which I feel is harder than ranger characters). But it's good! It's rewarding! By simply facerolling your keyboard and deleting bosses without thinking about what your doing there's no that sweet dopamine boost.

About loot - it's scarce, yes. But wasn't the main problem with loot in PoE 1 that there were tons of loot and all of it meaningless? Loot in PoE 2 means something. All I needed to defeat a boss that previously felt unkillable was that 2 hp/s regeneration chest I bought from vendor. Yes, vendors are actually useful!

I love the difficulty curve so far and I am just finishing act 1 as a monk.

Boss rewards are bad...