E.g. I consider the animancer chick (who was funny btw) in Raedrics Hold and the necromancer (who was funny, too) in the sewers of Defiance Bay to be some sort of boss encounters and they are really easy compared to standard enemies like ghosts/phantoms or god beware lions and wild life in general. That's especially buffling since they are entirely optional. You can either completely avoid fighting them (and still getting xp) or you can choose to fight them whenever you want. And the unavoidable boss encounters like in the sanatorium I found to be really easy again.
I guess it makes a huge difference how many party members you have. You took a party of 5. I prefer 6 and won't go with less because I think a party of 6 is ideal for customization and diversity (no, not that kind of diversity).
Well, I had more problems with them in the 1.x versions, but that might also come down to experience. Especially the undead animancer (or his minions?) in the catacombs seems nerfed, however.
But you are probably right about party size. Back when PoE was released and I first played Act 2, I wondered whether the difficulty dive also was because they decided to allow for smaller parties to be viable at the point. So in a way I wanted to check it out this time.
I should note that when I say PoE has become harder in 3.x's "Hard" difficulty, I still don't consider (esp. Act 2) particularly difficult most of the time.
There are some exceptions, but I understand that some players might want more.
There are plenty of "crude and simple" spells in PoE, and even more of them were added by TWM; the enemies are just not using them. Imagine if enemy groups used the same mix of low-level (!) prone, stun and paralyze AoEs that the player has access to - the game would become far more difficult, probably to the point of frustration. Even something as simple as casting Stuck on your melee fighters could have a huge effect. But the devs clearly want the combat to be asymmetrical, and so they give you a lot of overpowered tools and throw hundreds of trash mobs at you to pad out the narrative a bit.
Unfortunately the enemy spell casters always were a missed opportunity in PoE. Either by design or due to AI, most of the time they use rather ineffective spells. There are only few exceptions and even those usually rely on damage-dealing spells (e.g. the insect swarm spell of Ogre Druids).
Status effects being too weak has always been one of the stranger PoE criticisms. Some of the individual ones might seam weak by themselves, but then you have to consider how readily available they are, i.e. being attached to per encounter aoe abilities. In general with even a bit of debuffing aoe hard CC is really strong, especially on Hard or lower. The higher defenses on PotD make a bit more reasonable.
It depends. It's not true for status effects like prone, stuck, paralyzed, but there are also the "minor" ones in buffs and debuffs.
And most of them are per-rest. Especially the early level priest buffs only bestow a minor bonus, which is hard to notice with the miss-graze-hit-crit system of PoE.
It does become important on PotD, were stacking buffs and debuffs can be necessary, but otherwise you can ignore most of them. Since they introduced immunities, some became a bit more useful due to granting a temporary immunity to one or two effects, at least.
