Originally posted by Noodle:

Am I alone in this feeling?

No, I'm afraid you are not alone.
But most of those who see it that way don't bother to write it or just stop playing, for whatever reason.

An earlier train of thought of mine - I'll copy/paste this since it's a few pages back, maybe it will help you share your pain a bit:

"Similar experience in our group.
Everyone but 1-2 players lost motivation very quickly.

Don't get it wrong, we had one of the best gaming experiences when we entered Mistlands as a group for the first time and the war of the worlds beast came to attack.
I still believe that many people blame the difficulty or the fog as scapegoat for other missing core mechanics.

But it wasn't the level of difficulty, which on the contrary was sometimes the most motivating thing to keep going. I also found the fog technique very impressive, even if it could be improved a bit.
There are many small but essential things that were core mechanics in the main game, like the progression flow or the reward system, which is practically non-existent in Mistlands.

Even on my solo run now I enjoyed everything till Mistlands a lot more.
Until the end of the plains I have to force myself to turn off the computer so that it won't be 3 o'clock at night again, but once I'm in Mistlands I have to force myself to turn on the computer instead.

No matter how hard I try to love it, something pushes me away. In Mistlands, I suddenly don't know what I'm farming for. It seems like I only have to do the boss quickly because the armor is hardly worth it, the weapons are "okay", but visually also rather poor. Magic itself is a bad design decision from my point of view and I rarely play mages anyway.

You don't really want to build like that in Mistlands either, the only practical use of black marble is the cooking station or a construct that won't damage the base if you set up the refinery.

I could hunt deer forever in the meadows, I like to watch the meat roasting over my fireplace, then chopping wood and hunting again. But in Mistlands I have no desire to hunt rabbits or stay there for very long.

Everything I could build there is nothing I don't already have, it's just placeholders with a different design / no new mechanic / no practical use for anyone. I just replaced my roof on my farmhouse and decorated it with tar, but black marble doesn't fit in there anyway.

I mean... what is the reason to tear off my roof just so it's black and looks better - but I don't have a comfort bonus or anything else for it. I'm supposed to do the same thing again with the marble and stone? But instead of tar pits, grinding for black marble is very unrewarding. What for? It doesn't match in color anyway.

The whole design looks so "Harry Potter"-like, much more fantasy-driven than before. Should I put a black marble pyramid in my Viking village? Where is my motivation? How does that fit in? Everything flashes, everything shines and glows... I now have a viking disco instead of a cozy farmhouse. The cosiness was a huge factor in valheim - "cozy" the new word for building reference / black marble overall tends to be cold and uninviting.

Before Mistlands, you felt like you were slowly upgrading your base/making it more "cozy" / more "homely" - somehow it fit in - granted, the hot tub is questionable, but at least that fits more than a disco ball workbench and not making your main house a flashing fantasy castle.

The whole thing just doesn't fit in for me. And I'm not the only one in our group or other people I talked to.

Mistlands seems like a jumble of brainstorming ideas and casual player needs from the "marketing point of view", some of which have made it into the game thrown together due to their own perplexity, which can't tie up the logical loose ends of the "unfinished feeling Plains biome" nor to their own newly introduced magic. Moreover, they have failed to establish the same sense of progression flow as in the main game. Mistlands feels unexpected but extremely unrewarding while playing compared directly to the preview game stages.

What they have managed to do is implement a great art design and some very brilliant ideas poorly. Mistlands is 80% designer/animation work.

They seem to lack hard on creativity aside from the design aspect and lost the connection to whatever they wanted to do in the first place. Or, what I believe, their ideas were already used up at early access release.

Mistlands looks and feels like a tumor that has grown uncontrolled out of the cells of the main game and has been surgically polished, to make it look like it has developed naturally or better - to make it look like it belongs, but it's a facade."