Here's my big bag of tinfoil theories so far:
-Item rarity/quantity was turned down overall to A: make ArchNemesis feel more rewarding and B: make Uniques less common drops. That said I had an inventory of rares every other zone or more while leveling, so even if so it definitely wasn't that bad.
-Divine Orbs got their drop rate turned up. I've had 2 naturally and originally they're 1:1 with exalts, or even rarer IIRC, but my guildmates and I have had several drop. I think they just 1:1 swapped the straight up drop rate after removing the other sources whereas Exalts still have all sorts of cards etc so you can use them for slamming or T3 crafts
-Lake "Difficulty" is just Empowerment from Sentinel. Thinking it's 5% per difficulty so you're doing 5% less damage per level and they're doing 5% more. Making stuff at level 8+ PRETTY painful when you're almost doing half damage and some nasty mob types (ghosted especially) are ramming you
-The "tune up" that's coming will increase Harvest juice or reduce craft costs, make "difficulty" about 1/2 of what it is now, and make some Arch Nem stuff (Essence, Metamorph) not stack Nem hp multipliers with their inherent hp modifiers.
I'm 88 and I do about 2-4m Sirus dps with minions and I fought a metamorph in a blue T6 map for about 7 minutes last night. Temp Bubble and Magma Barrier and some other shit and it would just prevent my minions from getting to it with temp bubble, then leap away. I died once and I way saying over Discord "this better be worth it!" But then I killed it. 3 6 Links, Imp Bow, ES/Ar Body, and Ar/ES Body. VERY fucking worth it. I think that's the idea they want, it just never works in implementation except 1 out of 50 times. One day they're get the balance right, Metamorph and original Arch Nemesis were close, but they keep fucking up HP modifiers because they can't make things do more damage because people complain, so their solution is just longer fights = harder fights. An example of this is the Expedition bosses in Lake. They have a billion hp, but do like no damage. So you just facetank them the entire time. Kind of a meaningless experience for 3 Astragalis.
Reddit's whining is classic Reddit whiner stuff. There's real problems that should and will be addressed, but again 80% of them can fuck off. Like the outcry over Harvest for COLORING shit? Jesus Christ. Of all the shit they removed that's literally the least useful. Just use chroms or tainted chroms or the white socket recipe they give you in Harvest now or Vorici or the crafting bench. Shit like keep prefix/suffix was a MUCH bigger impact saving shit items than fucking rolling a non-blue blue.