I've gone about 90 hours solo so far, and I can say that it's definitely a grind.

But, for me, more than the issues of needing to drag metals everywhere is the lack of in-game guidance on where to get stuff. The change for iron ore from mining at nodes in the open world to searching through the Sunken Crypts in the Swamp was completely unexpected.

I spent a dozen hours looking around the world for new mining nodes that I could actually mine before giving up and looking online for what I needed to do next. Frustrating.