Mapping less fun than campaign?

Currently at ~80ish hours played, level 76 Stormweaver up to t5 waystones.

I really enjoyed the campaign and was excited to enter the endgame, and it was fun for a bit... but then it started to feel less fun, and it took me a while to be able to articulate why.

I've not run into big difficulty issues so far (except the ascendancies, I've given up there, I'll over level by like 10-15 levels before I try my third, and even that might be a waste of time).

What resonates the most with me is that the atlas points and the atlas in general doesn't feel fun at all. It also feels disconnected from what I'm doing.

I think it's because you need to make a bunch of decisions before you get to see any result: Picking a map to go to, planning a bit ahead if you want a league mechanic or tower, rolling or not rolling the waystone, then running the map... and then doing it over and over with no feeling of atlas progression except for the map turning green

In the maps themselves, there's the same issue of humongous areas that campaign had, but exacerbated by the fact that there's no checkpoints, and I think over two thirds of the layouts are twisty interior ones which take ages to explore.

I was sure we were going to get the checkpoints in maps as well, because there's a lot of wasted time just backtracking to areas you haven't explore yet, but nope. Hopefully that's something that will change? But I've left maps with over 50 monsters because the unexplored bits were on the other side and I wasn't going to travel for a few minutes through already cleared zones just for that.

So it feels overall very grindy - a bigger feeling of grind than campaign, because there's no immediate, clear goal and no big win. Especially with half the maps not having a big fight at the end, they just fizzle.

I can't speak about the league mechanics much - Ritual is 100% death all the time because I don't play a chain explode build, 99% of the rituals spawn with tiny zones because of the aforementioned map layouts, and I can't deal with all the mobs at once. I don't interact with this mechanic anymore.

Delirium I can deal with just fine... except I go in one direction, kill a bunch, it's a dead end, I have to go back and the delirium expires. It basically matters very little if it's on the map or not.

Breach is fine - no boss or notable drops yet, but I kill as much as I can, get loot, move on :D. Mobs are very dangerous compared to the map's monsters that I just killed. Some tuning needed? I don't avoid, but I also don't chase after breach on the atlas.

Expedition is the only league mechanic I actively chase on the atlas, because it's not so constrained by map layout and lets me choose my level of difficuty. I've only done one Logbook, but it felt very familiar and it was fun!

As for suggestions for fixes: Give more points faster? I don't know how all the progression works, but I'm sure there's an average X points every Y maps, round that up, make the quest always accept "tx+" maps (so I can do n t4 maps and they'd count for my t1+ quest and give me points... I THINK that doesn't happen for the first few tiers now?).

Add checkpoints to maps. Don't care about resets or respawns or nothing, but let me go across the map nearer to the unexplored bits.

Tweak the layouts. I am starting to actively path around certain layouts because they're so annoying to navigate. One of the cave ones, I think Crypt, I think... Seep? The flooded vaal city one, that's the absolute worst.

Add a meaningful ending to each map. The boss fights are great, but I can see how it would make a map even longer. But there needs to be something more impactful, imo. Maybe have a bunch of small triggered events in the boss arena zones - the chest that activated the terracota soldier horde, or the ghouls in the apex of filth zone, or something. Open a chest, interact with a thing, something happens, you kill all the things, you win!

Sorry for the wall of text! Been enjoying myself a lot so far, though as seen by this post, it's less so now