3 shot waste of waiting for invasions

Level VIT. Fights not lasting long are on you unless you're up against wheel/Whirligig dash r1 spam. This "everything's a 2-3 shot kill" shit is tiring. I've never felt my time wasted because it's gameplay that I'm in fully in command of, and i'm well aware that 50VIT has been the meta since DeS. If I got my shit handed to me in less than 30 seconds it's because the other player played well enough to earn that and possibly built their character more efficiently than me. I have footage of wheel mirror fights that lasted 2-3 minutes each, and it's a guaranteed 3-shot with that weapon. The fights last that long because we play conservatively and are more than mindful of our inputs.Maybe you're a little too gung-ho about things?

I played lots of DaS2 PvP, where level was made irrelevant by Soul Memory. So the "meta" was to just level your character as a jack of all trades and go with it. You'd think that would allow for more diversity as you say, but 7 out of 10 fights were against Dark weapon Chaos Blade users using sacred Oath, gmb and spamming the running/backstep attack. Then since level was of no consequence, when you'd successfully apply pressure they'd just pull out anything from their massive bag of tricks. 99ATT was commonplace, which resulted in hex spam, lots of great heal casts, people with 3 casts of forbidden sun etc. Their build doesn't have any serious limitations, so they're free to gravitate to all of the indisputably more effective setups with no consequence. You run into a similar issue with Bloodborne's PvP at higher levels, which I found totally homogenized the encounters.

Not everyone builds their characters with the same priorities or focus

Hit the nail on the head. You prefer your DEF softcap, I prefer my limitations. My fights last long enough as is.