Cosmic Exploration - Great for DoH, Stressful and Unpleasant for DoL

For reference, here is my background coming into Cosmic Exploration: Historically, a very casual PvE player, huge housing nerd, and a bit of a DoL main (though haven't really gotten into fishing). I haven't played much this expansion and only recently finished up the MSQ and got all of my DoH and DoL other than fishing to low 90s. I spent an *unreasonable* amount of time in the Diadem, thoroughly enjoying optimizing my gathering routes, GP and cordial usage, and determining what to gather for the best gil return on my time. I've been super excited to get into Cosmic Exploration.

The good:
DoH progression feels amazing. I've mainly been a macro crafter in the past, but the design and variety of the recipes makes manually crafting things feel really good with a really pleasant level of skill expression. The mech events are somewhat repetitive but fun and a great way to mix things up for the buff. The red alert events are enjoyable and rewarding once I figured out that there are two zones for the alerts.

The bad:
DoL just feels bad. This does not feel like FFXIV gathering at all. There is no way to engage with the content as a DoL without time trials? Seriously? I was extremely crestfallen when I discovered there were no gathering nodes outside of missions. No timed nodes either. Cordial chugging feels absolutely mandatory and there is zero skill expression. I get that the devs probably didn't want Cosmic Exploration to have a major impact on the economy so there is no resource trading, but they seriously couldn't have added a casual go collect 100 of x and 150 of y research missions without time trials? Or at the very least make the time trial missions refill your GP after you turn them in? There are absolutely some that are going to enjoy the time trial style missions, but (admittedly anecdotally) every gatherer I've talked to is really unhappy with how gathering has been implemented in Cosmic Exploration.

The DoL things are identical to existing DoL levequests, with a stricter timer. Recognized them immediately.

There is a reason that DoL levequest achievement grinders work on fish turn-ins instead.

DoL is just pain, already dropped the content. Basically I want to play the game and relax while doing so and DoL is simply not it in this content. I rather get what I want on the market board instead of touching this content ever again unless they adjust it. :/

Had a "leve" SW of the west zipline station.
At that location, it's a triangle layout, but one side of the triangle is very long.

If I spawned the mission while standing at the middle point, then run to the down point and finally running the long side up to the up point, it was impossible to get a gold ranking. There wasn't enough time to clear it even with unlimited sprinting. The only way to clear it was start at the upper or lower points, the time limit for it was just that tight.

And some locations just suck, like those near lakes where you can't follow the straight line of the triangle, but have to take a longer route. Some of the runs easily takes 15-20 seconds, and when you only got 3 minutes, that's a lot of time spent running.

And the reduce missions are just awful, having to sprint between points spread out very far, get enough collectables and get them reduced and get the items in roughly 1½-2 minutes just ain't fun.

At this point I'm just spamming the chain and chain+boon missions since those are fairly quick and easy.

So I agree with whats been said here thus far, but have my own observations to share.
There simply is not enough time to get through many of the A rank missions with a silver or gold rating in time due to the amount of running or GP involved. Im chugging my hi-cordials and cordials left and right trying to maintain GP or I have to sit in between "leves" in order to recuperate. Thus wasting my time and twiddling my thumbs (unless there is a fate going on if Im lucky).

On top of that, the menus to do Aetherial reduction are clunky and if you get unlucky with GP for collectibles, fighting to get thru the aetherial reduction menus before the time runs out is infuriating.

As for fishing, its tightly timed too in such a way that makes the casual and relaxed fishing content Ive grown to love into a chaos rush hoping I complete the tasks in as fast a time as possible.. It kills the vibe I loved about fishing so much!

DoL is leaving a sour taste in my mouth.

The dailies and critical missions are good though. They've got me up fast on a gatherer.

While I personally enjoy the time challenges, the lack of GP replenishing between them means participating is more of a waiting game than anything else. If you want to get Gold on any of the higher end missions, saving your Cordials for the right moment is key. For Fishers, AA stacks are wiped between missions, so no advanced GP play can be found. It doesn't feel good. Crafters can binge. Gatherers have to slow trickle.

I like them, they actually need you to check which skills make sense and which don't for which objective (e.g. when only chains count or only Gatherer's Boon things.) Yes, the A class tasks are hard, but every other gathering in this is already a faceroll with three clicks as soon as your gear is half decent, so I'm fine if this needs a braincell or focus.

Only thing I dislike is having to wait for GP to get back inbetween missions. This takes forever when you save your cordials for the missions themselves.

Edit: Btw, crafter tasks also have timers, just not in the beginning.

Yeah, playing gatherers feels weirdly stressful in Cosmic Exploration compared to crafters. I think some good changes would be getting a gold rating on a mission should guarantee a Revisit proc, and gatherers should get a strong GP regeneration buff while at base camp.

They should probably consider adding enhanced GP regen in while in Cosmic Exploration zones or have special Cosmic Cordial to help cause i see it as the biggest problem right now