I've put in about 8 hours so far and I am enjoying it more than I did Awakening. I started with Birthright on Lunatic/Casual and it's challenging enough to make me grind and plan things out. Magic is no where near as OP as it was in Awakening, and they've balanced the weapons all really well I think (for example, swords have ranged options now). On Birthright, even without the xp DLC, you can grind by paying gold and you make the gold back from mobs in the map,butit seems like lower level mobs give very, very little XP if you're too high compared to them. The min. xp/mob is 4.
With the Treehouse stuff, yeah I wish they hadn't messed with stuff so much, but the shitty dialogue was the same in Awakening and I skim all of the conversation for the most part anyway. I would say based on what I've played that the story/writing is better than Awakening. That said, I do miss the dual audio that Awakening had. I find bad English voice acting to be 100x more grating than 99% of Japanese voice acting, but that's just me.
I really enjoy the game and it's awesome that I'm only on chapter 8 and still have 2 other whole routes to play through.
Also, if people want to post their castle codes, I will add them to the OP.
Mine is: 01441-23690 | 87043-84766
and Nintendo friend ID: 3926-8168-5256