High-end mapping is mostly unrewarding yet overly punishing

I'm trying to wrap my head around why GGG insist on cycling 1 portal maps in and out every league. I understand that increasing the difficulty of the map for more rewards is the essence of POE's endgame, but maps are mostly unrewarding which puts the risk/reward balance completely out of whack. In order to have any reasonable chance at good loot, you must take on the highest tier of difficulty at all times with no second chances. Losing your juiced tower maps sucked, everyone hated it. So now we have no towers, but we still lose the ability to juice the map? I don't see how this is an improvement considering we do need to complete maps to move around the atlas. At the level of difficulty required to have the chance at good loot, every boss hit is usually a one-shot, which raises the tension in mapping far too high when you know you HAVE to complete a map in order to progress. Dying 6 times in a highly juiced map in poe1 was not exactly fun, but you have multiple chances to change your strategy and if you died, you move on. In POE2, you have a tangible marker on the atlas for every single one of your deaths that is not only discouraging, but can also impede your progress to more lucrative areas. I'm not seeing the vision here, and I'm starting to get frustrated with the whiplash of more or less portals every few months. I'm really hoping GGG can make their mind up on the desired difficulty, because it is truly all over the place at the moment. I love this game, but damn it can make you feel awful at times, and I never really felt that way in POE1. It's supposed to be fun guys, it's not always fun at the moment.