Honest/Constructive Castle/Warband Feedback

I'm sure Blizzard doesn't actually care what players think here, but after playing through the Castle both solo and with a few warband members - here's my rundown as concisely and fairly as possible.

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1. Castle is actually sort of fun as a solo experience - roaming dark halls, opening doors to find out what the next room has hidden, chests tucked into dark corners instead of sitting out in the open, random boss fights, etc. It's GOOD DIABLO CONTENT.
2. Castle as a "group" activity doesn't feel exciting... there's no real guidance on what your group should do, enemies aren't challenging enough to make the group dynamic necessary (they didn't seem to scale any differently between my solo experience and with team), and none of the loot seems to actually matter because I get 'Ancestral Weapons' from open world kills...
   1. To add onto this chaos, collecting remnants feels like the goal - but once a teammate grabs the essence and goes to purify it, your run is over... even though you have 2 other sections to explore... what exactly are we doing in here if it's just another "rift" mode where we run straight to a boss and then leave? You don't even need to wait for your team to be ready to summon the "boss" they're not scaled for group play and effectively a non-threat.
3. Remnant collection doesn't really feel rewarding because you need your warband leader to use them rather than having the ability to direct your contributions/loot to what you want. Losing player agency to a loot system sucks and this isn't fixing that issue.
4. The Castle needs a blacksmith/armory - there's 90% trash drops and if you're grinding castle runs to get remnants/essence, you will fill up quickly.
5. The Castle runs feel like something built to play as a "crawl" experience, pushing deeper as things get more challenging - a true roguelike adventure... but no - you finish a wing, get essence, purify, leave... you can explore the other wings for more remnants and trash drops (seriously why so much gray/blue drops?), but there's no real purpose to all of that time investment. The "challenge rooms" that you light up after clearing it are neat but they don't serve any purpose because I can steamroll through everything without a sweat. If this was a roguelike type dungeon, I'd retreat to the "cleansed" rooms for safety to heal or recover before trying to push further... there's no further... Come on Blizzard - we were so close to greatness here.

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On Warbands:

I joined a new Warband with active players specifically to engage with the systems as Blizzard wants us to.

1. There's no reason this should have been locked to the Warband system - it makes so much more sense as a Clan activity (especially since Adventurer clans have so little content already). Having multiple raid groups running through here to contribute to the Clan's overall improvement would have set up a Clan progression system that would be a better "universal" system for each faction to engage with outside of the Cycle tedium. Warbands would still be able to engage with the system without needing to be the gatekeeping factor that restricts your list of potential "teammates"...
2. While there were enough people online to run the Castle as a group of 4, we all could have independently cleared it solo because none of the fights are even remotely a threat... even the final boss was killed by 2 members while 2 were still exploring before we got the "closing" countdown... This isn't an engaging group activity, much less one you'd actually care about running with "close friends".
3. Queueing into this feels unnecessarily tedious - we have to enter the castle and then go to the hallway to start, which then lets the raid lead invite people directly... which functions just like the raid tree in Sanctuary... but there's no real incentive to organize that group in this way - you could run it 5 times alone in the time it takes a raid group to form and run it 1-2 times for the same damn reward. While I want solo content - I don't see why we're being ^(strongly) encouraged to group up with a consistent "crew" like this is something that takes coordination anywhere near the level true mmo raids do... even the "raid bosses" in Sanctuary are powerful enough to require multiple players to defeat - even if that's all a number tuning mechanism - the Castle doesn't offer anything that actually makes it "group content".
   1. You cannot run this content solo if one of your warband members is also running it at the same time. You cannot. I don't know what absolute clown decided this should be a singular raid queue, but it forces you to run it with any other member that is also running it... had a warband member go afk waiting for someone else to come online, so I couldn't start the run until they timed out and I could kick them... This wouldn't really be a negative thing if the Castle was scaled for groups -or- running separate wings made sense, but the way purifying essence ends the run is counter to that concept.
4. "Rooms" being player-specific is really fkn stupid. If you're a warband member, it would make far more sense to have the Castle "facilities" passively benefit the entire warband. Like putting resources into upgrading the Castle "armory" would grant access to the Armory in the Castle as well as a damage buff to warband members... or "Infirmary" would grant a bonus ressurection in the open world... simple benefits to the player experience that would be something to incentivize everyone to work together to level the rooms up...
5. Still don't really know how your progression from this system will move with you if you need to leave your warband for any reason... either you lose too many players to inactivity or toxicity, or just simply because you want to play with a different group of friends - the warband funnel just isn't a positive way to handle this.

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On Loot:

1. This feels more like running Temple of Namari 20 times to get your green drops, except Castle doesn't drop anything remotely worth the time invested. Remnants and Ancestrals aren't really giving anyone (in my group) any significant improvement to our experience - they feel like a band-aid to make yellow drops seem valuable, but in reality we're still being restricted just to whatever pushes the god-number higher. I'm not being given any control or agency in how this system will improve my power, because nothing it does supercedes the CR scaling lodestone around our necks.
2. Again - warband leader being the sole controlling decision on remnant use takes away any excitement for individual players to engage with this system. We can't make our own decisions on how we apply the spoils of our invested time, we just feed them all into the warband leader's coffer to use as they wish. Likewise the Ancestral Weapons feel... pointless...? We need to do 1000 points of warband activity before a lot of the additional power is unlocked, but even if we do all of that, the effects are still so minor that we'd get more overall benefit grinding easy dungeons for incremental CR drops. The Castle just doesn't seem worth the time for individual players and the warband as a whole doesn't benefit equally from the room buffs or weapon advancements.
3. Seriously why are all of the drops so heavily weighted into gray/blue? Even if I get a yellow ancestral drop, it's often lower CR than what was already slotted or it has a weak effect... what exactly is the point of just rehashing how we use yellow weapons from "scrap" to "maybe not scrap but most likely still scrap".

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TLDR

Castle is mildly fun as a solo experience, the dark halls and room exploration feels like the right experience in a Diablo game... but it's too short and barely challenging in that solo context. Tying it into warbands and group play doesn't really make sense (at least not right now), but the itemization/loot system is still dragging down any excitement about playing through this repeatedly - without some way to tangibly feel our progression there's no repetitive engagement to the activity... This feels, somehow, less exciting than seeing legendary armor drop... which is a shame, because the environment is exactly what I would want to see in a Diablo game.