Towers and mapping are entirely unmotivating in their current form

Disclosure, my perspective is one of a Path of Exile 1 Player. I'm used to POE 1 mapping and end game so no doubt my views are coloured by that. Taking that into account, I still can't help but feel like the main issue with POE2 end game is the amount of 'dead' content. For me the main symptoms are as follows;

Symptoms of the issue

1. Having to path to towers creates an impression of dead content. Having to run maps that don't have content yet (you haven't reached the towers you want to use) feels awful and obligatory

2. Having to RUN towers at all feels awful. EVEN with the new change that GGG is describing where towers can be affected by tablets, it's the exact same thing where until you have all of your towers set up and have used tablets in them, it feels like dead content that you must run

3. RNG of tower impact is horrendous. So let's assume you've run 10 maps to get to a new tower cluster that has potential, you've run the towers and placed your precious tablets in them. Now they impact 7 maps in a scatter gun array and your effort feels like a total waste. That's SSOOO demotivating.

4. Lack of control; Because of this, the envisioned combos of mechanics feel impossible. I'd love to run both boss tablets and ritual tablets on the same maps but the rng involved with the same map being affected by both tablets is ridiculous to me. It actively removes any kind of player agency or customization in their mapping experience

5. The circular radius and random placement of towers invariably means that there is a 'hotspot' of maps that you'd actually want to run, then the mediocre outliers that are kind of pointless. All the incentives are designed around multiple towers affecting the same map, but all the actual layout and systems fight against this which seems aggravatingly counter-intuitive

Observations of What Could Help

I'm absolutely not pretending to have the answers. All I can do is observe what I found myself wanting instead of what's currently there

1. Towers do not have to be run. As soon as they're uncovered by the fog, they can have a tablet placed in them

2. Towers affect every map in a radius (including the mechanic attached to them, not just the affixes)

3. I can socket more than 1 tablet into a tower so that I can reliably run more than one mechanic (Maybe running towers THEN has a point where you could unlock additional 'layers' of the tower, enabling more than one socket)

4. Tablet that maybe changes the layout of the maps in radius to the layout that you want. I can....not....stand most of the map layouts in POE 2 currently. Give the players SOME sense of agency over the experience they want to run over and over.

Right now, I don't want to bother running maps. I'm purely running Sekhemas because I can't stand the mapping system. This coming from a POE1 player who vehemently hated Sanctum. That should speak volumes.

Let us close map nodes without running them. This lets us eliminate all the tedious running of crappy maps that need to be run to juice the few that are left. Then also remove towers as a map, just let us click them and insert the tablet.

That's the solution to the atlas systems as it is. It isn't great, but its the least amount of work required for GGG to make this crap better.

The real solution is to scrap the endgame placeholder and come up with a good design. They delayed EA for this, and it is obvious they put about 15m of thought into it and then spent the months implementing what is here. So I suggest you do the quick and dirty fix of allowing players to click-complete on a node while you spend the next 12 months designing an endgame that isn't tedious, frustrating nonsense.