Missing Power Fantasy

I am going to open up with the campaign is great so far, most basic build concepts work, obviously some better than others, but, in general, the campaign is kinda difficult the first time through but manageable and fun. Every now and then a character will struggle on a boss due to enemy resistances to their build or gear issues, but they can be overcome. Like many others, I feel the honor system in Sekhemas sucks, but you only have to deal with it 2 or 3 times, so whatever.

My main complaint comes with the end of and after the campaign. My understanding was that POE2 is intended to be an ARPG where characters start off "weak/average" and grow into a power fantasy in the endgame, but this is far from true for most players. There are 3 or 4 builds each season that can achieve a power fantasy usually via exploiting a bug, using a niche unique interaction, or other unintended mechanic, while the rest just feel "weak/average" all the time. I think there are a couple problems here:

1) survivability - With top end gearing and passives dedicated to defense, it is possible to achieve a basically unkillable state. You will feel invincible but not powerful as monsters survive everything you can dish out for a long time, making the molten vault boss and zolin and zelina unbeatable. And any build not going heavy on defense has similar survivability to a build that completely ignores defense. Once you start getting hit, you are probably dead.

2) damage output - Damage scaling feels linear all game, normal mobs die in 1-2 hits, magic mobs die in 1-3 hits, rare mobs die in 3-8 hits, uniques take a few minutes. There are uniques in endgame that take far longer for most non-broken builds.

From this, I have a couple basic recommendations.

1) defenses should provide reasonable protection without intense focus on them, but ignoring defense should still feel glass cannon. This can be accomplished by increasing the effectiveness of defense nodes on the passive tree while removing some defense nodes from the tree and improving the effectiveness of armor and evasion/deflection. The Passive tree has tons of ES improvements nodes (100+) and even massive ones like 40% and 60%, but evasion and armour don't. Giving armor a less steep dropoff or more ways to convert physical damage into elemental damage pre-mitigation could help here. You could also scale the base values on gear more exponentially so high iLVL gear gives bigger bases without breaking campaign.

2) Damage needs to grow more exponentially near endgame. Both gear and skills should get bigger boosts post level 50. I am not recommending it be suddenly doubled or anything, but Base weapon damage goes up by about 10x from lowest to highest weapon, skills generally 3x their multiplier, while monster life goes up 1000x. Once all the passives, skills, combos, support gems, etc. are included, you about break even so you never feel powerful, you just might not feel weak.

I'd really like to get to endgame and feel like my character is improving towards real power, but today, unless I grab a top 3 character guide and exactly copy it for 50+divs on market, my character feels the same from level 1-90.