Pathfinder design is designed to make things take actions, take longer, and take time. Every action is met with a consequence. Every reward is limited, and difficult to abuse. Every decision is mitigated, limited edition, and useless unless perfect. It also seems to want to "realistically" spend your time, by making some unrealistic demands of your time.
Which comes across my latest learning block of character building. Which is Talismans. Talismans in PF2e are single use, items that attach to specific gear and have special boosts to your different skill rolls and attacks. Its like a little safety vest in some cases, or like a glow stick. You get the effect, it gets used up right away or it lasts for a short burst (usually a single fight or event) and then you need to not only put a new one on, you have to take equal time taking the old one off, or else the whole thing becomes muted.
There are so many other ways to run this to make it more fun, more valuable to players and without even needing to let it be abused. Thing is, that what I'm about to say, can be done for 10 extra minutes and more in game gold. Just let a player spend 10 minutes "recharging" the thing. Maybe as some sort of "focus" procedure, maybe not. Either way, it allows you to pick one up, and just keep using it. It gives great value to the Talisman archetypes and classes, and makes getting two a day that become inert at night much more valuable and not feel like a waste of a feature.
I consistently feel like Pathfinder 2 is afraid of power. Its afraid of ease of use. It consistently asks me as a player, to suffer for my fun. And that makes it hard to want to build or play the game. Which is hard to feel, when so many GOOD ideas are included alongside these terrible wastes of energy and time. So much good design and effort is paired up so poorly.
And I know they have Runes for things that are a much more permanent effect, but this temporary effect didn't have to be a money sink and time sink all in one that also means that the feats for getting them also feel like so much less, when the feat also only gives you talismans of half your level, which is fine at level 2 and way less powerful at higher levels.
Suddenly though, it makes sense why at level 16 they are willing to let you have... 6 free half level talismans per day for free....which is 600gp for free per day. Or you can also spend 1800gp to get one, that ... helps you confuse a monster that grabs you, once. Maybe for 1 round or less, maybe for 1 minute. That's not bad, but maybe its because Pathfinder 2e actually has a plan on how to give you money, and pays you well, and doesn't have the same issues with money spending that D&D5e has.
Maybe that's the key. Because they plan for you to have money to spend, so that you can have a stack of 5 1800gp single use talismans. This is why I want to learn more, because its obvious the design is there for a reason. In 5e this is terrible design. But in a game that plans around your gold income as a metric for the functionality of items, maybe that is a lesson to learn. So what is your income like in Pathfinder vs D&D? Does anyone look into that at all?