The issue with this league is that it feels like a stopgap. Something they just quickly tossed together to bridge the gap before the holidays, after which the devs vanish for a month. Druid clearly wasn't conceived overnight. We've seen media for it going back to 2023, and it was obviously meant for 0.3. Instead, it gets punted to 0.4, Jonathan binge-plays Loop Hero and decides that suddenly needs to be PoE's new personality, so we get a slapped-together mechanic that's shaping up to be another Synthesis headache that's a total pain in the ass to interact with. They bolt it onto the Vaal/Incursion ecosystem to give it some level of familiarity, finish the last chunk of Druid work they've been sitting on, and stamp it as a full release. All while Keepers league feels like they barely bothered.
This is exactly why I keep saying it's time to sunset PoE1 and has been for a while. Settlers should've been their last "real" league and now they should just do wild shit until it slowly dies. It's over a decade old at this point anyways, time to let go. It's obvious they don't have the staffing to meaningfully support both games, so now we get two half-committed products instead of one focused one. And yes, I realize the irony in part of the frustration being that we're comparing PoE2's output to PoE1 (the best ARPG on the market) but that comparison is unavoidable. The only studio capable of dethroning the genre leaders is GGG themselves, and ever since PoE2 hit EA, it feels like they're on track to do just that.
Maybe 0.5 finally brings the substance everyone's waiting for, because this league is a hard skip.