I agree with a lot of the criticism here. It's definitely a sour point for me just how slow earlygame and midgame is, as someone who loves everything about DD.
Darkest Dungeon can keep playing forever on one save if you wished. After the map was updated here, this seems impossible in this game, which is a damn shame and means you eventually get softlocked if you lose your raised parties and have only medium-high difficulty dungeons available, basically guaranteeing further losses every time due to hit rate and crits/luck being much less of a factor here (and crit chances you're basically unable to meaningfully affect at all besides the token that guarantees ONE crit unlike DD where tactics and overpreparation can minimize RNG or turn it into an advantage)
Perhaps the game could use some difficulty settings...? DD has them, and while Radiant difficulty gives minimal bonuses to dodge and doesn't do much for the moment-to-moment dungeoneering besides that, it still immensely reduces grind in the hamlet section of the game.
Here there's definitely more potential for more than that. I feel like way more people would enjoy this game if there were optional or perhaps unlockable settings to, say, generate dungeons on already explored squares (and raise their max limit), or make crests removable through some high cost, or make the levelup/goal restrictions on bringing raised girls to easier dungeons more lax. Something for more casual players who just wanna make a guild with a bunch of cute girls.
Hope this will come in some future update, or at least through fanmade mods. But seeing as there's no actual place to even get mods for this game besides joining a discord server (which most people will avoid), mods addressing the game's flaws wouldn't be ideal.
I ended up trying out the Dev's previous game after discovering this one, and I noticed that tedium and artificial difficulty (AKA "difficult for the sake of being difficult" without any actual depth, challenge or meaning to it) seemed to be a big trend in the game design there. But it's nice to see the improvement in that regard now that I'm playing this game! Even if there's still a ways to go.