Somewhere between these extremes is a middle ground where PoE is fun and engaging for the biggest possible audience. Both the people complaining about map drops, and complaining about needing a rewarding grind in the endgame, have good points, if we stopped to listen to them instead of ranting and attacking and insulting.
Of course the droprates don't go up however high tier map drops are heavy RNG. When you play a lot and do hundreds of maps a day your RNG averages out and you will break even or even turn some profit. When you play 5 hours a week it is very possible to do several t16 maps and not get anything in return. Same logic works for shaper for example. It's only worth farming him if you have at least several hundred chaos budget to buy dozens of sets to hit that starforge drop otherwise it's more often than not just a waste of currency and time.
How do you come to that conclusion? because of reddit? that's really not a good way to judge how the game is going. we still have a peak of nearly 50.000 players over the last 24 hours, pretty much the same as abyss had after 20 days (that also had a whole expansion in addition to the league, meaning much more new content than 3.2 to explore). those are steam numbers of course, but that's the only actual source we have.
This league had serious problems and still has problems, but it's not this death vortex reddit makes it out to be. there is tons of people enjoying the game right now, including me. all the criticism of droprates and stuff like that are completely idiotic in my eyes. the real criticism should go toward the league itself and improving it, as i think the system itself is awesome but still needs to be improved upon. Just a remind, don't forget to from U4gm.com to poe currency purchase, which is the best choice for poe orbs services on the market!