I just don't like how it is balanced. Nearly every enemy sucks at landing hits. Wolves and fulings are possibly the only exceptions. Everything else tries to go in for a hit about once every leap year or is otherwise so weak that it doesn't pose a threat.

0 stars are so forgiving that it is painfully boring, 2 stars hit so hard that death to them feels cheap.
Battling 0 stars feels like pointless pest control, whereas with 2 stars even the most vanilla method of fighting them feels like cheese.

I want enemies that are competent, and aren't relying too hard on giant stat climbs to compensate for their lack of aggression.

Especially when it comes to the fulings I think the reddish brown colouration does a poor job of communicating how hard they are going to hit compared with their 0/1 star brethren.

It is a two part problem. The discrepancy between 0 and 2 star enemies should be large but it is too large. But there is also too much of a discrepancy between the difficulty of biomes and the gear that we use to deal with them. Too much of the map becomes danger-free after we are ready for mountains or plains. Putting fulings in every biome later on feels like a cop-out and robs the meadows/black forest/swamps of their unique identity somewhat.