Mood.
I think the main roadblock for people is that those that didn't get him for free have to do kahl missions, which are subjectively not very fun and objectively not very warframe, not to mention that he is a very late acquisition in progression that a lot of people get comfy with other frames that can do similar things. That's before thinking about the handful of pain points in his kit.
I've been using Neo Launcher since nova was bought, its def doesn't have feature parity but it had everything I personally used from nova.
Rewards are alittle better, but for the most part yes. They are still working on a revamp to item economy.
Is your proton set to experimental? because mine is working on arch. If it is, try verifying files, or if that doesn't work, back up your saves and nuke the prefix.
It has more legacy dungeon areas for its space compared to the base game, and those areas are also larger. I had a moment that reminded me of ds1 in one of them, but i wouldnt say its like ds1 because of that.
I am technically below spec (rx 570) and had similar performance in the base game. The only setting that helped was lowering the resolution, and when i did i could actually push around half the settings to medium from min. Outside of the map and icons it wasnt actually much of a downgrade surprisingly, so i would reccomend trying that and see if it applies to you.
In Dark Souls 2, the giants memories were active warzones, with active npc fighting and artillery. Not in a field though.