MAPDESIGN - Is it fun or is it frustrating?

I ask myself: What is the most fun part about an ARPG? In my opinion, that leveling up, trying out your build, finding cool stuff and destroying whole screens of monsters. So that's something PoE1 and 2 already have. But the next question arises: What is the least fun part about PoE2? For me, personally, it's the map design during campaign.

Mapsize: I think it's too big. Some maps are really huge and can take up to 20 minutes until fully explored.
Deadends: Most maps have dead ends. And not just 1-2, we are talking about 15+ deads ends.
Sidequests: Finding these sidequest locations is sometime a real pain because of the mapsize and the deadends. Very often I find the entrance to the next area before finding the sidequest locations.

I say this, because I think the mapsize, the deadends and the scattered sidequests do not add anything positive to the experience. It just makes the campaign longer and therefore tedious before reaching endgame. I dont mind this when rolling one character, but as soon as I have to roll a second character, I have to do it all again and no matter how good my qequipment is, I still have to explore all the maps, which is very time consuming.

Using Checkpoints and Sprint really helps, so that's a step into the right direction. But I think if the maps would be a little bit smaller, like 35% smaller and have much less deadends, the campaign experience would increase dramatically, at least for me. It would also motivate me to roll more characters, since campaign would be a good experience then compared to now.

Thanks for reading.

PS: PoE2 is great, I just think the above would be a positive change =)

So no one has an opinion on the current mapdesign of campaign maps?

when you will finish tutorial amd get to map juicing you will hit another even more annoying thing about maps. More than half of.your maps will have chilled ground or temp chains on them due to extreme map prefix nerf in patch. You will be forced to walk with snails speed big part of the time on them, unless willing to sacrifice a lot of passive nodes trying to compensate that. This experiance is complete game killer for me in a long list from this game

Once you learn the basic layouts it gets a lot easier. Its not like you have to do campaign over and over in a league unless you play hc and die a lot.

Its a lot better now than it was at launch and we have sprint now.