I never tried Long War on either EU/EW or XCOM 2 because it looks like it takes the minor gripes I have with the vanilla games and amplifies them into major ones. Poor tutorialization and lots of obfuscated information leading to some needless trial and error, the campaign already overstays its welcome a bit, some battles already go on for too long if you're playing optimally, the difficulty curve is already wonky, etc.. 100+ hour campaigns with longer missions and a more time-consuming metagame that you need to research/watch videos of prior to playing to have a chance of success sounds like a nightmare to me.
I think it's really impressive with a lot of great features, but I'll stick to vanilla with a bunch of QoL mods.
