Skill issue on FromSoft’s part, and I say that as someone who has been a fan of their games longer than most people in this thread - more than a decade before even Demon’s Souls. Their original talent was always in detailed, immersive world design. Their gameplay was unpolished and experimental, but that’s something I liked about them. They got a smash hit with Demon’s and Dark Souls and made a hard pivot towards iterating on that formula. They still embrace their roots as a studio focused on detailed world building, but they’re trying to move more towards action and encounter design to cater to Souls fans. Where once they were highly experimental, now they seem afraid to try anything different.

A better studio could find a way for players to share that struggle and triumph while still allowing players of different skill levels to enjoy everything the game has to offer. That studio would be Supergiant with Hades’ God Mode option, which slowly gives more damage resistance each time you die so the player still struggles and gets better until the handicap and their improving skill meet in the middle. In the context of Souls, this could be separate for each boss. Or another entirely different approach could be taken. The point is merely that there are ways for players of different skill levels to still share in the same struggles, FromSoft is just unwilling or incapable of finding them.

So as a longtime FromSoft fan, I think they’re the ones who need to git gud.