Tbh, as a 1.x player, I'm not hopeful of how fun the Hamlet defense in basically its previous iteration would seem compared against other open-world-ish content. It was fun for the time, sure, but little of it was fleshed out; it was slow, and the synergy was minimal. Aldeport was definitely one of the better ones, with multiple points of attack and a boss who you could (though I'm not normally fond of gimmicks), separate from his army until you were ready to burn him, but even it didn't really feel put together tightly enough to feel all that superior to a generic defense FATE.

Personally, I'm looking for more ways to integrate crafters and gatherers into the world in general, perhaps using modified FATEs just as the start of that, but with an aim at reducing reliance on FATEs in general later on.