I love souls games but I love them for the lore. there’s just so. much. god. damn. lore in those games. I will spend hours, days, even months just picking up every item I can to read the description and get a tiny little nugget of lore. Sure I love the boss fights and I really love this DLC because I felt the base game was too easy. I mean when you’ve played all the previous Souls games Elden Ring is by far the easiest one, so this DLC makes me feel like i’m playing Dark Souls again.
All that being said I agree with you, I think there should be an easy mode or what I would call a “explore mode” where you can just go around and easily fight things while building the story for yourself.