PoE is interesting but "too slow"

I like both games. A lot. But as an SSF player, I feel the fatigue. While the mechanics and combat are interesting, the slow, often unrewarding progression both in gear and XP turns an otherwise pleasant experience into a chore. I have heard "the other side" a lot. That after 3000 hours I "should not expect" to have found X, Y, or Z. And to an extent, this has been true for all chase items in the game. Why bother?

I am not asking you to change the game. Do as you please. But with more and more forms of entertainment competing for our free time, I see lees reason to put hundreds of hours in an activity to then feel like I have wasted by time.

Once the novelty wears off, repeating the same grind becomes unrewarding and outright a chore. Keep in mind that aRPGs also share a collective burnout effect: when you are tired of wasting time in one, this depletes your desire to play the others.

This rings especially true to an arpg and even more so for an arpg with leagues.
The campaign alone is a tiresome chore, it's not even remotely challenging, just pure tedium. Then once we've dragged ourselves through the tutorial into the actual game we are met with disrespect for our time at every turn from loot to crafting to map exploration and everything in between the number one most common piece of feedback given is the game is too slow.

They have been told in the forums, on reddit, emails, and even directly to their faces in the interviews they do with streamers, but they simply do not care. Instead, they double down.

I don't know who they think their target audience is, but it's clearly not the actual playerbase.