I've beat all the souls games, busted my balls to eventually beat Sekiro, and I have completed both Nioh games. These are exactly my sort of games. I would say pre-patch Lies of P was more frustrating than challenging. It felt a little off and it made me lose interest quickly. The games does feel better following the updates, though I did flatten the Archbishop dude on my first try, so they might have over-nerfed that one. Going through it now, it feels 'reasonably challenging', perhaps ever so slightly on the easy side, but that's the thing: I've played thousands of hours of these types of games, they shouldn't feel like a super slog to someone already very familiar with the mechanics and genre - if they were they'd be impenetrable to anyone who's less prepared.
This was a good move by the developer.
What is this 'creative vision' bullshit? Chances are this was balanced as best as they could get it based on internal testing, but once it was out in the wild they had a lot more data to better tune it. Team Ninja ran multiple alphas on Nioh and even put out feedback forms for players to fill in. That community feedback directly informed the design of the final product - did they sacrifice their creative vision, too?