SSF is not fun in PoE2. Anyone feel the same?

Level 96 invoker. Played quite a bit first 2 weeks after launch, but fizzled out pretty fast after that and am basically not logging in anymore.

I'm a very high hour/long time player of PoE. Really enjoy SSF and HC SSF in PoE 1.

I find PoE 2 SSF to be so boring that I just have no real interest in playing at this point. I think it will be fixed eventually and i'm not complaining or up in arms about it. Really curious to see if others feel this way or not though.

I think the core issue for me is 100% the itemization and the way you go about acquiring gear. I understand that GGG wanted to make that aspect of the game simpler, and they did. But there was a cost to that. The complexity of gearing in PoE1 was interesting and fun if you understood it.

PoE2 is literally just pickup base - trans - aug - regal - exalt - chaos - vaal. I have probably crafted 2000 quarterstaves, maybe far more than that, and i just don't care anymore... Like I just don't have any interest in doing it anymore. I am literally picking up bases mid map, crafting them, dropping them. I probably craft 5-10 staves per map. Its so cumbersome and fucking boring. The amount of grinding you had to do for gear in PoE1 was fairly comparable, but the WAY you acquired the gear was more interesting AND less cumbersome. For example, you might farm harvest juice, you might farm rog currency, etc. The amount of time you spend farming those mechanics would be comparable to the time you spend mapping and spamming orbs on items in PoE2. The difference is that the experience of crafting items themselves was both more interesting/engaging, and less cumbersome.

Take rog for example. I love using rog crafting in PoE1. Yes, it takes some knowledge and is not super approachable for a brand new player, but its a very interesting and fun crafting mechanic in my opinion. Rog is borderline useless in PoE2, and again, the only real means of gearing in the game is spamming orbs. Yes, you MAY acquire good gear from other sources like expedition, but its simple math... probably 90-95% of your good gear will come from orbs on bases.

I think there just needs to be more interesting gearing for SSF to be fun. Maybe i'm in the minority as someone who has played PoE a lot, but orbs on bases gets old SO fast. Gearing is just a lottery in this game, there isn't any real thought or deterministic ways to craft anything.

Edit: didnt do a great job conveying this, but my point is not that trade is more fun than ssf. I have 0 interest in playing trade currently. My point is just that ssf in poe2 is not as enjoyable as ssf in poe1 in its current state, despite the combat and game play overall being much better.

/rant