Well, yes. How else would you up the challenge after 10 years of making the same game over and over again? The only real way is to genuinely overhaul the whole game into something else like they did with Sekiro and to a lesser extent Bloodborne.
Which they sort of did by borrowing mechanics from those games but without actually incorporating them in any sensible way. The game technically has Sekiro stance breaking but without the meter good luck even realizing that its a viable mechanic(doubly so on NG+).
It also technically has Bloodborne's rallying mechanic but made utterly shit as for some idiotic reason hidden behind a very late game boss so I have no idea how are you even supposed to incorporate it into a build. Plus the damage in later stages is so absurd that hit trading is just utterly unviable if your vigor is under 60-70 and even then with the amount of stagger inflicted its debatable if you will be able to make consistent use of the mechanic(doubly so in NG+).
I am actually about 90% sure that the great runes were supposed to stack together. It would certainly explain those bizarre mid-game jumps in enemy HP and damage because if you were stacking morgot's, godrick's and radhan's runes all on top of each other it would nicely smooth out the difficulty curve. And even if not I am 100% sure that great runes were not designed with rune arcs in mind as the buffs the runes provide on their own are just too weak to be bound to such a limited resource.