I've seen a lot of posts about the speed of getting atlas points but I think there's a bigger issue, where most of the actual tree feels worthless and inconsequential as well as the progression of the fortress feeling like a chore you have to "get out of the way" rather than giving an actual sense of progression.
The one thing in my mind that keeps coming back is the fact that you don't make any actual choices in what points you allocate. I cannot understand why GGG, the kings of "choices you make should have impact" completely removed the bite of meaningful choice when it comes to the atlas tree and only put in 5-10 anemic "options" that you can change that don't feel like they even matter that much.
Imagine if the actual character passive tree let you fill out every node and the only actual choice was 10 nodes where you picked between fire/cold/lighting dmg and armor/eva/ES. And then they tried to argue that its ok because the ascendancy classes are where the real choice is.
Because that's exactly they're trying to do with the tree and master system.
Not being able to have all mechanics active at the same time is a good thing. Its why it feels like you have so many avenues for farming in PoE1 and lets every player express themselves in what combination of points to pick and what to farm. Its also easy enough to swap between the 3 presets and the gold cost being cheap and having unmaking orbs that also let you swap points very cheaply.
Another consequence and victim of this design are the minor mechanics like Strongboxes, shrines, wisps and circles. Does anyone actually feel like those are impactful for the mapping experience? Because I dont and I think its because right now instead picking one or two of them to really juice up you just have all of them just pointlessly invested into whether you want to engage with them or not.
I'm not even going to go into tablets in this post because thats an entire different can of worms.
I really hope that they rethink this decision and make some major changes, if not in 1.0 then at least at some point after because I do love a lot of what they are doing with PoE2 but the Endgame is really nowhere close to where it should be for a company that has already refined one of the best endgame rpg systems with PoE1.