It seems like a lot of people I am talking with expected a lot from this expansion. I understand why. People have been looking forwards to a lot more explorable PvE content for a long time. Emphasis on exploration. For instance, when the climbing mechanic was announced people were elated. This is because BDO's climbing mechanics was already superior to that of Breath of the Wild when BDO first came out. Plus, our characters have edge-detection and female characters (two things Breath of the World or Shadow of the Colossus does not). Therefore, people were very hopeful this new region would have a lot of explorable features. It, however, does not.

This situation, however, was explained to us well in advance. 

The devs pointed out back at the Calpheon Balls (the last two) that the game was shifting to focus on giving us two new points of gear advancement. These are Blackstar Armors and Fallen Gods. Effectively this means that that meta has shifted twice now. Once from Green PENs to Gold. Then again from Gold to Orange. However, Orange gear has two gradiants: Blackstar and Fallen God. This means Blackstar Weapons are not even the "end" meta. They are transitional gains to something still greater.

In the mean time the devs have stated that we are getting the following areas for sure: Elvia A, Winter Region, Elvia B, Haso (Japan/Korea/China area: eg Port Ratt), Elvia C (?), and Upper Desert / Jungle Remnant region. 

In short, the Winter region is entirely to do with moving through transitional gear and its drops are fixated on that. Therefore, it's drops are roughly the same as Turos was for us when that first came out. It was never intended to be the new meta region to grind in. 

That said, the Labyrinth area is quite the disappointment. It's pretty clear at this point that the Devs are not capable of developing things like other games when it comes to PvE content. This is not a vast underground complex and isn't going to be. It IS instanced, so they theoretically "could" improve it, but I wouldn't hold your breath. 

One of the things we have to be aware of is that the West is a declining or dead culture. Consequently you receive no better than you are. Declining to impoverished content. If you expect better of someone be better. That's just the harsh realities of life. For the time being then, movies and games are going to re-release content because you'll accept that and maybe just a little less each time. 

This is why despite that Tab Targetting is a perfectly reasonable thing to still have in games people say it is "progressive" to not have it. Just as it is "progressive" to not have a healer in games lately. However, the Westerner is very good at using slippery language to perform a malicious slight of hand. Thus, while "progressive" sounds nice the reality is "progress" can also be towards something like "off a cliff", which is exactly where the West is going. 

In this way, I think people have at once done two things:
A - Not paid attention to the devs spelling it out where the game was going with this next expansion release.
B - Not improved their culture that they might be respected enough to get things that live up to their expectations. 

-- People simply aren't going to put in the effort to produce things of quality for you if you strip things of quality out of the world. 

As a dying culture cannot be easily revivified the issue of B is not a blame-game statement. It's simply where we are ate. The West is dying and people are willing to put the effort in to revivify. Therefore, people will increasingly treat it with the same amount of respect that it itself treats it. Which is to say... "Less".

Of the first issue, you should be preparing for the following scenario:

a. work on moving away from Gold Gear as the meta

b. don't dive after Fallen God gear right away. Focus on Blackstar Armor if you're at the point you can.

- this should be around 285 ap and 360 dp. 

c. learn to restructure the time-to-rewards you receive

- Western games condition people to be murder-hobos. This works in BDO up until TRI gear. Then you might notice that there are no further drops in the game which are equal to a FULL gear upgrade. This is because TRI gear is the point at which the game leaves areas where you are fighting bandits and raiders (real world issues) to fighting fantasy creatures (stuff that only exists in religious stories or high fantasy: here be demons). And so, you start fighting spirits, then demon altered beings, and finally demons in true (which is where your blackstar stuff comes from). This is because some of the inspiration for Blackstar Gear comes from stories like Berserk. If you've paid attention to the main story at all Hymns to Elion work to get the Black Spirit possessing out of you. Likewise, your armor causes you and others who wear it nightmares. That's because Enhancing that doesn't use the Sage's civilization's technologies / spiritual energies is basically hell-magic. 

- From TRI gear forwards you are, therefore, expected to have already mastered things like:

. using your family to amplify your wealth growth

. doing more activities than being a murder hobo

. understanding how to spend money to make money 

. understanding that when the devs start pumping the game with certain buffs or features for awhile there's a reason for that and you should be taking advantage of it

Eventually you'll discover that TRI gear to TET means any major drops like Garmoth's Heart or Vell's Heart will only give you 1 to 3 major gear upgrades rather than a full 13 like before. From TET to PEN things halve. And then from PEN forwards things halve again. 

. it's still possible to go through getting your gear to 600 or 700 gear score in a few months, but you have to learn to use ALL of the things at your advantage

From TET to PEN and Onwards you've got to look at the game like a playthrough of Persona 5.

- You can't do everything.

- You need to pick something and go with it. Not try to be a master of all.

This is hard for a lot of gamers from other regions to wrap their heads around, but you do not NEED to be able to have PEN Lifeskill Gear AND PEN Combat Gear. 

- one of these is more than enough

- and having had TET to PEN in both of these I can assure you there is literally not time enough in one day for you to do both of these activities 

I've had very high gear score in both of these only to realize I literally couldn't run out of Energy if I also had Combat Gear. You might think, "Well that's awesome!", but no. That means I can't actually maximize my potential earnings. I physially couldn't be in enough places at once to take full advantage of the gear I had. And so, like Persona games I had to LEARN to stop behaving like a dog given too many balls. Pick one or stop obsessing about these thing entirely; leave everything else behind behind.

I see a lot of people treating these issues as major flaws in the game, but realistically you can't pick flowers all day (if that's your thing) in World of Warcraft and also do 6 hours of dungeon grinding. Neither can you do 6 hours of dungeon grinding in Final Fantasy XIV and keep up with Lost Ark. If you're playing Lost Ark enough to hit meta you probably didn't finish Graek on your Switch nor find everything in Breath of the Wild. And certainly didn't finish Astral Chain. 

- Don't see someone with 700 gear score as a person who has reached 'meta'. They certainly have some liberties you do not. However, they also have issues you don't have. Do you really need them? It's not hard to start making gains like Biohacks makes. The trouble is really - do you want to play like that?

The Winter Region certainly didn't come with the Climbing Skill or Sympony of the Night / Ori and Will of the Wisp dash and double jump abilities like people were hoping for. Neither did it come with a proper dungeon (again). That's true. 

But the Winter Region wasn't ever meant to be this grand meta area. It is meant to give you the items you need to upgrade your helmet and that's about it. Like with Odylita's castle I wasn't expecting this unreachable area to be finished on release and... low and behold it was not. Will it ever be? Don't know. Do I care? Not really. The devs made it pretty clear the stuff coming up next is another Elvia release and Haso. Likewise, the main meta ahead of us is moving from Gold to Orange Gear. Finally, rearrange how your bringing in your incomes to actually start giving you rewards at a more regular pace than 180 days of grinding. There are ways to do this and devs hand them out constantly. People just haven't put two-and-two together yet (which is probably for the best honestly). 

Overall, don't try to get sidetracked on too many goals. You don't need Lifeskill Gear AND Combat Gear. Realistically, there isn't enough time for you to play both anyway. So, if you're looking for it as a "change of pace" that cool. However, first learn how to reshuffle your goals in the game to match the time-played you're expecting things to deliver rewards. It's very possible, but the majority of people never stop to think about this. It's why most guides for this game are just very wrong and unhelpful. So, treat the game more like Persona where you've got a limited amount of time to get through the Shadow Worlds / Dungeons / Palaces (whatever they are being called  this time around) and you'll get through things with a lot greater ease. And don't expect much in terms of vast sprawling content in games anymore. Metroid Dread's level design leaves you  barely enough time to full move the joystick left or right before the level area you are in is over. Cultures that don't respect themselves don't receive respect in return. The majority of any media right now is going to be crap in one way or another as result and it's going to keep being crap for the duration of our lives unless people stop being crap to one another (which doesn't seem likely to change any time soon either). So, here we are.  

The game was never siffted towards blackstar armors. If the devs said BS like this, that's only a another great example on how disconnected they are from their own game.

It also never shifted from boss (and not yellow, since you can convert green armor into yellow aswell) either, as fallen god armors are build from boss, basically they just instead of adding HEX, HEP etc. another enchament levels, they added a proxy item for that. (That can't even be chaprased, and which downgrades even harder unless you convinience enchance it with cash shop)

This is a different swift than what happened with grunil/green as they went straight into the garbage bin...

Expansion focus was the storytelling. That's it.

I know its nothing groundbreaking for most of us but for PA it clearly is. We had 3-4 videos explaining how they changed it, how they did the voiceacting, how did they improve ths music score. In every Ball, video, stream, you name it, they keep repeating: We hope you read the story, we hope you dont smash the R key....

This expansion was their test subject for the new storytelling they want to implement on the game (starting with balenos rework as shown). Everything else is secondary, they slapped the new helmet there, made 2 grind spots with some additional rules to test and that's it.

not realy sure what ive read.. i read the whole thing 
was it a content rant - a modern day philosphical analysis or a neat tip how to enjoy the game without burning out?
At some point i was asking myself if you had  smoked some of the herbs you collected in that pen lifeskiller cloths and maybe it lead to this post?

When it comes to respect for content and western culture i can tell you that developer dosnt care about culture,respect  or anything of the social aspect of gaming culture at all. 
What they care for however is making money, it is a industry and they do develop stuff to make a livelihood.
The content is the result of many analysis to see what would be the safest way to cash-in in appealing of the biggest crowd of gamers that can be achieved. The safest way to do so is copy paste from a working system and create a alteration of it. Doing something new that is not established yet however is a risk that has to be taken in Terms of losing money and losing a already achived livelihood.
Copy paste in AAA is the meta looking what works from oher games that are successfull and copy that as an own iteration in the own IP - pretty much what is happening with BDO right now. We finaly get the PvP Arena and we get Artifacts and stuff and we get this not because our culture is trash but we get it because this kind of content is sucessfull in Lost Ark and it draws the costumer from Pearl Abyss to Smilegate. Remember when BDO suddenly became a Battle Royal?.Companys will do anything to make their costumer happy they just dont want to take any risk if they dosnt have to. As long as the cash flows in why bother. It is first when the cash suddenly dosnt flow anymore
when the analists start to put in work "Whys that" and based on that analysis a solution is developed.

TL;DR

As long developer face competition we will get better and more enjoyable games ad infernum

Pearl Abyss does indeed design this game heavily around making money, an making money not a bad thing they need to stay profitable to keep the lights on an employees feed. But PA takes it to levels of pure greed at times, take the fairy system or horse systems for example, only way to grantee get a T8 courser is spending around 50-150 dollars on skill reroll tokens only way to get a T4 fairy with max level skills is to spend at-least 50-150 dollars for skill reset tokens. Trying to obtain these items via in-game means only is virtually impossible no matter how many times you try.

Than we look at gear enchancement you need 2-4k cron stones for 1 fallen God attempt that means you need to melt 10-20 outfits per attempt that 300-600 dollars an even than your still looking at a 95% chance of not getting anything from your investment. Now you may say "less than 1% of the population spends that much in this game" an this is most likely true, but well that less than 1% gives PA more money daily than the other 99.99% have in years (I mean I've played this game on an off now for 4 years I've only spend 150 dollars on it so far, yet some whales have publically addmited to spending 10k dollars per week on this game) , which means PA is more inclined to add more predictory tactics into the game than they are fun an enjoyable ones. It like my boss always tells me "they only buy 1,000 dollars worth of product from us yearly I don't give a shit what they want, this other company though they give us 200,000 dollars yearly give them whatever they ask".

In the end of the day there making a healthy profit an than there just pure greed both invail making money, the thing is the first one shows you still care what your consummer has to say the other is just as long as profits increase the consummer can fuck off.

False advertising been a thing for 100,000 years, not like PA the only one gulity of this. Biggest offender of this are Gas stations now a days their big sign out front will say 2 dollars per galloen than you go to the pump turn off your car open your tank cap an see the actual price on the pump say 3.50-4 dollars per galloen, but by now your already committed an you'll just mother fuck the station under your breath but still pump the overpriced gas into your car. An ya the Gas stations they get fined for falsely advertising it's prices, but statically they know the profits they get from customers they trick outweights the fines they have to pay for falsely advertising so they don't care.