I had a similar experience. I think it was mainly the small combat encounters that dragged out, as well as there being something off about the tone. But it's hard to put my finger on exactly.

With how much hype I saw online I thought they had improved on the systems from from DOS 1 but in a lot of ways it feels worse.

The new initiative system means it makes no sense to invest points into it since no matter how high it is, your enemies will get to go first.

In my first attempt at playing I tried to have a varied team that can do different types of damage but the new armour system made that useless. The only thing that matter is getting as much raw damage as possible. Most of the interesting effects only apply once you take down all the enemy armour. This also make most traps useless since you can walk right through without any I'll effects.

But the thing that irritated me the most was the inventory. It's slow and annoying to use and so I decided to try the official mod. After using it to sort all of my inventory into specific bags I found out that you cannot trade or craft using anything that was put into those bags. At that point I just started a new game.

Now on my new game I am getting bored with how slow the fights are. This isn't helped by the unintuitive puzzles and the weirdly toned story.