Yup. I've been collecting and buying everything as I go. I'm at about 25 hours and I'm still working on getting all the chests in Forli. Then it's on to Venice...
Totally. Each assassination was its own sub-plot with its own beginning, middle, and end. The Desmond sections were a nice break in the action and emphasized the "chapter" change. There's no such break in the action in AC2. It's just go, go, go. That's poor plotting IMO. I love so much about the game, but they really dropped the ball in figuring out how to structure the story. More than anything else, that's what makes AC2 inferior to AC1.
So far, the most egregious pacing problem was the sudden jump from Forli to Venice. You blast through Forli with absolutely no pause and almost no story missions. Seems like they cut a bunch in that section (presumably ended up as the forthcoming Forli DLC pack). But the story's already so patched together and sloppy that you almost don't notice.