This has been my experience with most Gacha from mihoyo honestly. HSR was probably the worst because the story bosses could actually be really hard without the right team.
There is no pressure here, there are not even Tier Lists and Meta. Therefore, this problem is absent here as a fact.
Have you heard of a little game called Sims?
No, that's not it at all, The Sims is a life simulator, where you manage the lives of characters without the ability to directly control them, plus the clothes are purely decorative, you can leave them alone. Here the game comes directly from the character, clothes are of great importance from the point of view of gameplay (Each outfit actually opens up some specific activity for you, or allows you to participate in certain duels). Plus, it's still an adventure game with a huge open world, in The Sims you are locked in box locations =)
After a couple of hours in, I find the game to be..good? Gameplay mechanic feels easy to control and the game really looks beautiful even on my old PC. I can't believe I even spent time trying to dress up Nikki, its ridiculous. Probably because the game allows me to customize Nikki's dress and looks from something as small as a hair clip to her shoes and even socks is what made the game..appealing? I can truly make Nikki dress up the way I want her to be and can't think any other game that can reach that level of detail. I'm beginning to question my manhood.
As for characters, as I only met up to the magician dude before I stop playing, and before that, Dada. Not much to say but glad they are not cringe like the Dragon Age Veilguard clowns.
Momo is a great buddy and actually is adorable.
I did encounter plenty of stuttering but maybe its due to my old PC, and there were some server issues too where I though the game almost booted me out from the game. They really need to fix that.
The big turn of to me was, as expected, the gacha system introduce early on. The monetization could have been introduce a little bit later after getting used to the crafting.
I play with PS5, and unfortunately I can't give advice on technical issues on PC, but in general the game is quite demanding in terms of hardware, especially if you set everything to maximum (This is actually one of the reasons why they had to lower the graphics on phones to the minimum settings). The problem with the Servers, yes, there is an influx of players, it turned out to be too big, now some of the servers are stalling, although on PS5 I am already better experience than on the first day, today I played on average with a ping of 45-70, on the first day my ping was consistently in the yellow zone of 80-120.
Well, as for Gatcha, unfortunately, there's no getting around it, the game is free and they need to earn money somehow. Although I agree, I would first give the player the opportunity to craft 2-3 costumes, to explain the crafting mechanics in the game, and only then connect Gatcha.