This kind of defeats your argument. If you’re only going to make it less than 3/5 of the way through content then your build isn’t doing fine. Of course it’s also not really your builds fault though, AoZ was just badly implemented from top to bottom. Had they balanced it for normal builds and didn’t have the glyph then it mights have been better. That’s what I wish it was, a challenge of our skill instead of just being meta builds and grinding.
For me, I think a combination of the gauntlet and AoZ would be pretty awesome. You know, having the gauntlet style scale up as you progress so getting farther would challenge you more. Sure it might sound like having greater rifts but implementing them better with a better progression would be awesome. Greater Rifts got boring precisely because you could just grind more paragon points until you beat it. D4 has a power cap so you would have to rely on yourself to win instead of grinding higher paragon points to just brute force it. But all that means you can’t just have 25 times the HP on enemies so they’d have to be deliberate in their balancing. Like T25 could have a mini boss room halfway through and it’s 3 Uber Malphas at the same time or something. Could be wild if it’s done right.