Ascendancy Trials... Am I crazy?

The trials in PoE2 were definitely poorly thought out, let me try to explain why. Every build in PoE is based on Ascendancy Points. It doesn't matter if you're a newbie or the most experienced player in the world; you will ALWAYS base your build on Ascendancy Points within the game. What does this mean? It means that Ascendancy content is MANDATORY content that everyone – whether a newbie or the most experienced player – will have to complete. This means that the mechanic for obtaining Ascendancy Points needs to be of MEDIUM difficulty (like in PoE1). Basically, mandatory content needs to have medium difficulty mechanics, and optional content (endgame farm, etc.) should give you the option to scale the difficulty to the highest level. In the current state of the game, what's happening is the opposite: the mechanics of mandatory content are the hardest in the game, and it shouldn't be that way. In PoE1, to get Ascendancy Points, you need to complete the labyrinth, and the difficulties of the 4 levels are relatively moderate. Any newbie player can complete the 4 labyrinths with a few tries (and it needs to be this way because it's MANDATORY content). The way to get Ascendancy Points in PoE2 makes absolutely NO SENSE. It's boring, extremely difficult, and demotivating.

From the first day of Early Access until today, I still haven't managed to get the third Ascendancy Point on any character (I'm on my third character).

The game overall is incredibly good, but it gave me the worst experience I've ever had playing a melee character (slam)... and the Ascendancy trials were probably the worst experience I've had in any game... I simply don't know what they were thinking when they put this in the game, especially since they said it would be a well-PACED game...