I would read said rant as well.  My relationship with Bioware games is difficult to articulate.  I enjoyed KoTOR and liked what I played of KoTOR 2, but Mass Effect made me realize Bioware RPGs are just not for me.  I played 1 & 2 and just didn't really care enough to finish the story.  I wanted to like them but they're just so uninspired.  Or something like that - again, not really sure how to explain it.  Mass Effect 2 had all these really cool setups.  For example:  Setup: actually find that enemy ship, go there, and try to figure out what's going on!  Result:  Walk down alien corridors, shooting stuff until you get to the end of the corridor, then trigger some meh plot point.  Haven't touched any Dragon Age games but they look absolutely soporific.

Togs, I'm playing an archer too and I DO NOT ENDORSE the bug you describe. I will not allow it in my game. That sounds annoying as... like... grrrrrrrr is it all the time? Every combat? That's basically a game-ender, I would think.

The one that has been a big problem for me is the occasionally ghosted-out conversation wheel. Anyone else had this? You walk up to someone and they're all, "thanks for saving my kitten from that tree, but now it is being chased by a dog!" and you can just barely see "I will save it!" "Man, fuck your kitten" and "Herald of Andraste don't save kittens for free" But you can't choose any of them, so you keep starting the conversation over and over to no avail until you just have to find one of those bunny things and kill it out of spite.

And, like you, I've outpaced the game's pacing. I'm around 11th level and just wrapped up the Choose Mages/Choose Self-Important Assholes quest, which was marked as 4-7th level. I haven't noticed if I'm not getting XP.

Too many notes. Fun notes, sure, but still too many for the one little symphony.

Oh, I also picked up Lords of the Fallen on PC.  I've played around with it some, enough to defeat the first boss and then get the gauntlet.  I like it.  More specifically I like the feel of it and I'm able to look past its generic high fantasy art style.  It feels weighty in that Dark Souls way (something Dark Souls 2 broke).  It's obviously more than a little bit inspired by the Souls games.  But although it copies some elements verbatim, it is still its own game.  Still, I'm not sure how I feel about said gauntlet...seems a bit out of place.

Mine seems to run fine on respectable settings.  I pretty much stuck with what the game set itself up for, which were pretty high settings for my not-so-new-anymore rig.  I have an i5 3570K and an Nvidia 650.  I haven't run Fraps to see what kind of frame rate I'm actually getting, but I don't remember any obvious slowdowns or bugs.

It's a very pretty game, with a cool haze effect in the interiors, plus some excellent smoke effects.  Really sets a nice tone.  Swinging that big hammer around and feeling the heavy, crunchy movement is quite satisfying.

Yeah that first boss fight didn't seem to offer much in the way of tactical variety and of course I can't comment on any subsequent ones yet.  I ran into an odd respawning...occurrence also.  Maybe not the same as yours, but after I found the gauntlet, every enemy between the previous "bonfire" and the spot where I found it was gone.  Whether or not that's by design, I haven't played enough to know.

I like Vaati's take on Lords of the Fallen.  He doesn't see it as a clone or any similar disparagement you can give it.  Rather, he considers Souls a new genre of sorts, and LotF simply another exploration of it.  Semantics perhaps, but I agree with him.

Haven't heard of Salt & Sanctuary but I'll have to check it out.

Yeah needless to say the games have a lot of baggage.  I remember when I first picked up Demon's Souls I was terrified of it.  Not terrified in the sense of a horror game (like Fatal Frame 2 - that right there is terrifying) but in the sense of fear of the unknown or of failure.  It was ridiculous.  I distinctly remember it was December 2011 and From had set the World Tendency to Pure White for a time.  Even then it took me a while to drum up the courage to explore.

No other game, ever, has affected me that heavily.  So while I lament all the negative feelings towards the game, I can kind of understand them.  And in a sense I wouldn't have it any other way.  It's a special game and it deserves to be treated differently.  Inevitably that will rub some the wrong way.  I don't think it's necessary, or even desirable, for Souls or Bloodborne to be embraced by the masses.  I don't mean that in an elitist way.  Just that anything which appeals to everyone is always a little less meaningful.

Souls may not fully deserve the reputation for being super-hard, but they do deserve to be recognized as games that push back.  Not everyone will be on board with something like that and that's OK.

Yeah Salt and Sanctuary looks great.  Haven't seen it on Steam (I know it's still in development).  Are they trying to get it on there?