Griping about Assassin's Creed Valhalla

So, after finishing Odyssey (a very good game) and Origins (at least a good game) I started Valhalla. And it still feels like it's starting despite now being in chapter 2 in the kingmaker arc in Tamworth.
The game feels rough, and I don't mean in the rough and tumble viking kind of sense (although that as well), but in the sense of it just not as enjoyable to play as it's predecessors. Where in Odyssey I might just have decided to clean out a military camp for the fun of it here... it feels like work. And there definitely was a lot of work that went into this game, it just doesn't come out the same way.
Some notes:
* the river raids are necessary to gain more resources, but they also are a bit stupid. So you are sailing rivers that don't show up on any map, and you can even raid your allies because they won't know it was you. It's basically a whole seperate reality next to the main world,and that bothers me.
* in fact, raiding bothers me. I just don't feel it is enjoyable. And that starts from the very core of it being violent robberies, and doesn't get better in actual gameplay. Doing it once or twice might be ok, doing it as a core game mechanic is tedious. In Origins you were a Medjay, and in Odyssey one played an amoral mercenary, but one who was just playing two bad sides in a war. Here you are playing someone robbing resources from farmers.
* when you hit civilians you get the desync warning as usual for an AC game (because assassin's don't hurt innocents), but that goes for the middle of a raid as well. You are trying to tell me Eivor the Viking never ever during one of the raids killed/enslaved an innocent?
* There's an interesting way to gauge the reception of a game via Steam achievements. I don't know if this is correct at all, but Steam shows you have many other players have the same achievements. So Origins tells me 30% of players have finished the main quest. Odyssey tells me it was 33%. Valhalla on the other hand tells me 7.3% of people managed to do the first raid in England, which is the first thing you do in the 2nd chapter. Which means about 92.7% of people who played the game gave up before they reached Chapter 2.