Given the thread this is probably preaching to the choir but I feel like one of the biggest things that makes people hate DD is that it leaves some of the mechanics purposefully obtuse. The specific case I'm thinking of is how it never really directly tells you that you can use items on setpieces beyond the ones required for turning in quests. I've seen multiple people on stream and irl list just.. not figure this out, and get fucked over incredibly hard because they never realized that coral shrine + holy water (iirc) = huge free stress heal or any of the other similar combos.
Also lots of people apparently don't realize using these to remove negative quirks is essentially an entirely free source of money, because actually paying to do this is prohibitively expensive. Negative quirks on characters are essentially game-ending if you don't pay attention to them, and yet, many players don't bother removing them at, for instance, eerie coral. Got some herbs? If not, why not? If so, bye bye negative quirk.
And then there's the absurdly useful Caregivers Convention town event. You can trigger this by just going on a Weald mission that has this as the reward. If you've leveled up the Sanitarium to 3 slots you get three negative quirks removed, and can simultaneously lock in three positives! This would cost something impossible to get like 60,000 gold if you actually had to pay for it.
Oh, and then there's the Bank rush strategy. There's a building you can get that gives you 5% interest on all your money every week. This isn't much if you spend it all but if you spend about 20 weeks putting away 5,000 every week, it basically means everything you do is free.
So just in short, there are ways of trivializing this game and all its strategic problems and just whipping its ass every single time. You just have to THINK. Just git gud instead of whining about how supposedly "hard" it is. It isn't.
