Rushed the content pretty quick, got to post story, soloed everything. The weakest afflicted monster has about the same HP as Fatalis in Iceborne does for solo scaling, or about 60k HP. The fights aren't any harder, at best they get an extension on one of their combo attacks, instead of doing 1 slam, they do 2, etc, and then they get this explosion move that sends an aoe of orbs out (easy to avoid, and it's a dps window). So, all they really did was turn mobs into HP sponges to drag the fight out for longer. This is more a problem for multiplayer than in solo play, and I'll explain why below.
The average skill level of the community on this game is simply atrocious, they're beyond bad. Even on the discords they're bad. Hunts dragging out for 2-3x longer than it would take me to solo it, I ended up installing coavin's DPS meter mod, and I'm like my god, how the fuck does someone only do 10-11k damage in a 10 minute hunt? That's total dead weight in master rank. Multiply that by 3 other players who contribute that poorly, or worse, and it's just not a fun time at all. The group of killers I teamed with on discord in Monster hunter World don't play Rise. So, I've gotten bored to tears soloing stuff, and at the same time there's no decent players to team with, so I decided I'm pretty much done at this point. I'm dead serious when I say there's hunts where I did like 70, 75, even up to 80% of the team's damage on a 4 person team. They appear like they're attacking the monster, but they're just not doing any damage. Do people understand that doing damage to the monster and not carting is the absolute best contribution you can possibly make to a team in a game like this? The monster has a fucking HP bar, and the best thing you can do is delete chunks off it when you land hits. Period.