Fundamental Balance - Mark was spot on

In the interview, he stated adding all this new content has really hindered their process for balancing the fundamentals.

Balancing all skills, ascendencies, monsters/bosses, fixing the passive tree ect now that they aren't adding new content for a while.

This is honestly my biggest gripe. . The endgame obviously needed updating but adding an entire league every patch when I would much rather have those fundamental issues in a better place. It's tough getting exciting for POE2 when after playing a new league I start getting annoyed/tired of it so quickly due to those fundamental balance issues not being in a good spot. Just wish they had focused on that more.
Part of why I keep coming back to POE is the large balance changes each patch and there really hasn't been in some time

Same, and I think I won't be coming back to check the game out until 1.0. Most of the 'balancing' that happened this patch is weird and only prevented me from finding an interesting and workable build I could be satisfied with. It doesn't touch the 300 mph lightning meta builds or CoC Comet or whatever else. They get to run free, and finding anything interesting outside of that feels like it's being actively forbidden.

They're balancing (weirdly) everything that isn't being used, and letting the clearly broken stuff go nuts. I'm sure it's good for PR to do that, streamers love it, but what a miserable theorycrafting experience this has become. I feel like I'm being actively told "play the game like this, or don't play" at this point. So, kind of have to choose not to play. It's really sad. I feel like I was promised a sandbox, but it's just a box: no sand to play with.

I don't know what the intention is from GGG, but it really doesn't feel like it's build creativity, and that's what I came for. All the new content in the world is worthless to me if I have to play it with the same broken shit that has been meta since 0.2.

Now, they have more content, and will have to race to balance the entire game from now until their December deadline for 1.0. They have decided to focus on content before creativity, and that tells me a lot. The balance, the playability, the creativity, is an afterthought, left to be squeezed into the final deadline. That's a bad look and a bad feel, for someone like me.

Hopefully they make a good effort between now and December, and when I come back to the box, there's sand in it. For now, GG.

I believe the game is where it is balance wise specifically because of Mark, among other major things. Based on what he's said over multiple interviews.

They quite literally admitted in one interview they had a balance team of 2 (Mark and some other guy, I believe) and that wasn't even Mark's main job... and they pretty much insisted on not growing that balance team for a reason among the lines of "we were afraid they would balance things wrongfully" or so. Supposedly they were working on growing the team at the time of that interview.

I think the results speak for themselves when you read the patch notes, no?