I find Crimson Desert hard to pick up again

After 5 months and 100 hours, every time I come back I start questing, do a few, get bored, stop playing. I find that I can go several hours doing nothing fun in that game, while if I play Elden Ring and just go to a unmarked location to see what's there, I'll usually find a boss, puzzle, dungeon, labyrinth, underground section, dungeon within dungeon within dungeon, jumping puzzle, and be rewarded. Crimson Desert I could find a similar experience, or it could just be nothing, and the rewards usually feel lackluster in most cases. In most cases it feels like I'm finding nothing. It's like most of the game is pretty backdrops with very few meaningful explorations.

Now maybe if I jam another 200 hours in I'll find and do more things I'd enjoy, but it's so much time to put in. In my hundred hours, I remember a walking tree, a maze puzzle, the child village, a bell tower that lead to a 5 chain of sky island puzzles, the reed devil fight, the spider lab puzzle, maybe a few more sky island puzzles, a siege battle and several bosses... Which sounds like cool experiences, but that was within 100 hours. In Elden Ring I'm 37 hours into my playthrough and have experienced 3 massive underground sections, maybe 50+ bosses, maybe 40+ dungeons and several massive dungeons within dungeons, etc. I've explored everything up to the snow biome for the most part, maybe some stuff missed, and if I keep pushing maybe in like 20 hours will finish the game (unsure how much is left, but I'm well over lvl 100 so it's starting to feel close). I can get the DLC for another 40 odd hours, but realistically within 100 hours I get a full base game + DLC experience with:

ER (136 hours completionist):

• 238 bosses
• 31+ weapon types
• 300+ individual weapons
• 600+ armour pieces
• 100+ shields
• 100+ accessorcies/talismans
• 100+ ashes of war
• 300+ sorceries/incantations
• 64+ spirit ashes
• 100+ enemy types
• 6 major regions + underground areas

vs.

CD (256 hours completionist):

• 76-98 bosses
• 5-10 weapon types
• 80~ weapons (higher if you don't counter variants)
• 150~ armour pices
• 78 shields
• 179 skills
• 5 major regions

It takes way longer to get through all of CDs content vs. Elden Ring which has a higher density of content, dungeons, bosses, builds, but takes way less time to experience. CD feels like a MMORPG where you'd spend hundreds of hours doing nothing really meaningful and maybe the odd hour or so you'll do a raid or a dungeon or a boss that will feel meaningful, but it's a seldom experience. Elden Ring feels like every hour you're fighting a new boss, experiencing a new dungeon, seeing a new area, getting a new item, and maybe within that hour it could be several bosses, dungeons, etc.

Now obviously they are both different games, and you can't do half the stuff you can do in CD in Elden Ring. But why should I care? It feels like once I've experienced something once, there's little reason for me to ever do it again. Mining and woodcutting seem to be the most universal repeated content, but things like the trade wagons, farming, herding, housing, and other aspects feel so thin in their experience that once you've done them for a quest, it feels like there is little reason to care about doing them again -- not for fun at least.

I could maybe stop doing quests and just run off and explore, but what usually happens is I find something cool that I cannot experience because it's locked behind a quest. This keeps happening to the point where I've given up exploring all-together unless it's quest related.

I thought that given the serious amount of work they've put in I'd come back and really start enjoying myself again, but even with all the changes that smoothed the friction I had, I am still left wondering 'where is the fun stuff to do?', even spending hours at a time doing mundane tasks with that question lingering in my mind I decided I'd rather just go play other games.