Dark Souls 2 has to be one of the most unfortunate victims of circumstance in gaming of the modern age.
I wholeheartedly believe most of this game's "negatives" can only be read as such if you're comparing everything about DS2 to its precursor. In any random game, not giving you i-frames for animations like open doors/chests would not make the game 'unplayable', it would simply be a part of the game you have to play around. But, because so much of how people view DS2 has been informed by how people view DS1, it becomes a negative; some runbacks are incredibly frustrating because of this, and you're now unable to just dive into a room, aggro 20 enemies, get a gate open, and expect to make it back to a bonfire. In general, you can't play most of this game like DS1. If you watch a video like Feebleking's 'critique', the constant thing you will find people comparing this game to time and time again is, naturally, Dark Souls 1. A lot of the people that adopt a 'ds2 bad' attitude like Feeble are very eager to blame the 'incompetencies' of DS2 on the b-team devs, which to me reads as a very blatant, hostile and unearned disrespect to the people who made the game.
I just can't buy into the idea that this game is 'bad' because people who didn't know what they were doing took over. Every design choice about this game strikes me as trying to purposefully disrupt almost every tie this game has to the 'Dark Souls' name without severing the core ideology of the franchise. It's not like the devs didn't know about the first game when they were making this. They didn't come into production trying to drum up the best way to make the most divisive game of all time. There's an intent and purpose to the design changes of this game that the prevailing negative lens fails to interrogate. For example, take Lifegems; Lifegems completely disrupt the Estus system of the first game which itself has been gimped dramatically as Estus healing is much slower and more limited, especially in the early game. DS2 is a game that takes place in a world where bonfires are on their way out or forgotten by most; Firekeepers are spoken of as if no one's seen any in years, and the fact that there are three of them living together a five minute walk away from Majula is an absolute oddity. It's the same world of Dark Souls, but it's absolutely nothing like it. This game is not Dark Souls 1, nor can you really play it like Dark Souls 1, which is why I think pointing to Dark Souls 1 as to how DS2 could have 'done it right' is a really flawed idea; It's absolutely trying to not be DS1. But it still is very much a Dark Souls game.
I think about systems in DS2 like Lifegems, ADP, Bonfire Ascetics, and Soul Memory and think 'Dark Souls 2 was made to be broken', which I think a lot of people have overlooked as the years have gone by and DS2 has been relegated to being the 'black sheep' of the series. When I realized Ascetics could be used to re-fight bosses, it wasn't long after I learned how ridiculous the souls drops from The Rotten were on higher NG+ iterations. Then, I learned I could buy a stack of ten from Grandahl (so long as you're part of his covenant), and another ten from Agdayne, and after a few hours I jumped like 150 Soul Levels and got Rotten up to Intensity 19 or something before the returns became ~1.5 levels per clear and I had most stats for my build at their softcaps. I was in shock during the first couple clears, half expecting myself to walk through the fog gate at around Intensity 10 to see like, three Rottens in the arena, or maybe he grows four more arms each with a new weapon; any sort of indication from the game to say "ah, I see what you're doing, you naughty boy. But this is where your fun ends!" but the game just lets you do this. The game just hands you a car, the keys, and enough gas for the US to plan an invasion, and doesn't even try to call to make sure you're still in the state or something (This is also a large part of why ADP just doesn't bug me nearly as hard as it seems to for a lot of other people. I had ADP at 24 for 99 Agility for almost the entire game and I was fine, you absolutely do not need to farm levels to dump into this stat like some people would have you believe). This isn't some strange glitch like menu duping in DS1 or the areas of the Elden Ring map that will give you hundreds of thousands of runes if you jump off them with Torrent that sometimes get patched. You were absolutely intended to do this if you were clever enough and not averse to experimentation and risk. This is also 'the' way Soul Memory becomes a useful tactic for skipping the first half of the game; on NG+0 the Soul Memory required is 1 million, which you can get with <5 Ascetics.
I really hate to just sum up why I'm nowhere near as bothered by the game's shortcomings as most people to a 'skill issue'. Honestly, if you've tried playing this game and can't get past Iron Keep or Shrine of Amana or wherever, that has to suck, and I wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help you besides saying 'sorry, guess you're gonna have to kill everything enough times for the enemies to stop spawning or possibly respec/restart your playthrough after researching tips on builds or what weapons to use on fextralife.'
But let me just be honest having only played the first two Dark Souls games so far: Both of these games are built on mountains of jank. Dark Souls 1 manages to give you a view pretty enough to distract you from what you're standing on, but Dark Souls 2 is just begging you to look down. It wants you to realize what you're walking on, no matter how jagged, abrasive, and clunky it is, is actually not that different from the sky.
I wholeheartedly believe most of this game's "negatives" can only be read as such if you're comparing everything about DS2 to its precursor. In any random game, not giving you i-frames for animations like open doors/chests would not make the game 'unplayable', it would simply be a part of the game you have to play around. But, because so much of how people view DS2 has been informed by how people view DS1, it becomes a negative; some runbacks are incredibly frustrating because of this, and you're now unable to just dive into a room, aggro 20 enemies, get a gate open, and expect to make it back to a bonfire. In general, you can't play most of this game like DS1. If you watch a video like Feebleking's 'critique', the constant thing you will find people comparing this game to time and time again is, naturally, Dark Souls 1. A lot of the people that adopt a 'ds2 bad' attitude like Feeble are very eager to blame the 'incompetencies' of DS2 on the b-team devs, which to me reads as a very blatant, hostile and unearned disrespect to the people who made the game.
I just can't buy into the idea that this game is 'bad' because people who didn't know what they were doing took over. Every design choice about this game strikes me as trying to purposefully disrupt almost every tie this game has to the 'Dark Souls' name without severing the core ideology of the franchise. It's not like the devs didn't know about the first game when they were making this. They didn't come into production trying to drum up the best way to make the most divisive game of all time. There's an intent and purpose to the design changes of this game that the prevailing negative lens fails to interrogate. For example, take Lifegems; Lifegems completely disrupt the Estus system of the first game which itself has been gimped dramatically as Estus healing is much slower and more limited, especially in the early game. DS2 is a game that takes place in a world where bonfires are on their way out or forgotten by most; Firekeepers are spoken of as if no one's seen any in years, and the fact that there are three of them living together a five minute walk away from Majula is an absolute oddity. It's the same world of Dark Souls, but it's absolutely nothing like it. This game is not Dark Souls 1, nor can you really play it like Dark Souls 1, which is why I think pointing to Dark Souls 1 as to how DS2 could have 'done it right' is a really flawed idea; It's absolutely trying to not be DS1. But it still is very much a Dark Souls game.
I think about systems in DS2 like Lifegems, ADP, Bonfire Ascetics, and Soul Memory and think 'Dark Souls 2 was made to be broken', which I think a lot of people have overlooked as the years have gone by and DS2 has been relegated to being the 'black sheep' of the series. When I realized Ascetics could be used to re-fight bosses, it wasn't long after I learned how ridiculous the souls drops from The Rotten were on higher NG+ iterations. Then, I learned I could buy a stack of ten from Grandahl (so long as you're part of his covenant), and another ten from Agdayne, and after a few hours I jumped like 150 Soul Levels and got Rotten up to Intensity 19 or something before the returns became ~1.5 levels per clear and I had most stats for my build at their softcaps. I was in shock during the first couple clears, half expecting myself to walk through the fog gate at around Intensity 10 to see like, three Rottens in the arena, or maybe he grows four more arms each with a new weapon; any sort of indication from the game to say "ah, I see what you're doing, you naughty boy. But this is where your fun ends!" but the game just lets you do this. The game just hands you a car, the keys, and enough gas for the US to plan an invasion, and doesn't even try to call to make sure you're still in the state or something (This is also a large part of why ADP just doesn't bug me nearly as hard as it seems to for a lot of other people. I had ADP at 24 for 99 Agility for almost the entire game and I was fine, you absolutely do not need to farm levels to dump into this stat like some people would have you believe). This isn't some strange glitch like menu duping in DS1 or the areas of the Elden Ring map that will give you hundreds of thousands of runes if you jump off them with Torrent that sometimes get patched. You were absolutely intended to do this if you were clever enough and not averse to experimentation and risk. This is also 'the' way Soul Memory becomes a useful tactic for skipping the first half of the game; on NG+0 the Soul Memory required is 1 million, which you can get with <5 Ascetics.
I really hate to just sum up why I'm nowhere near as bothered by the game's shortcomings as most people to a 'skill issue'. Honestly, if you've tried playing this game and can't get past Iron Keep or Shrine of Amana or wherever, that has to suck, and I wish there was more that I or anyone could do to help you besides saying 'sorry, guess you're gonna have to kill everything enough times for the enemies to stop spawning or possibly respec/restart your playthrough after researching tips on builds or what weapons to use on fextralife.'
But let me just be honest having only played the first two Dark Souls games so far: Both of these games are built on mountains of jank. Dark Souls 1 manages to give you a view pretty enough to distract you from what you're standing on, but Dark Souls 2 is just begging you to look down. It wants you to realize what you're walking on, no matter how jagged, abrasive, and clunky it is, is actually not that different from the sky.