feedback on various mechanics realted to minions and detonate dead

Hello, feedback on playing various minion-related builds with the Infernalist up to 95. Using mouse movement only.

Pure minions:
hardly playable fluently on most layouts because minions get stuck in corridors. This makes constant resummoning via weapon swap mandatory, which feels lacklustre at best.
The result is that you are forced to play ranged minions as a workaround. This problem is amplified by the number of minions I summon, which makes me feel punished for trying to scale my damage via the amount of summons. This should be my progression as summoner.

Detonate Dead:
dd, feels powerful, but the targeting feels very questionable.
Walls, obstacles, or an out-of-bounds cursor position cause me to cast into the void most of the time, playing the animation, draining resources, but never triggering a cast on a nearby corpse. This happens a lot in tight areas, doorways, bridges. As a player, I would assume that a viable position close to my cursor would be chosen when my character performs an action, or the action is simply not performed.

As for doorways and walls, as a user I have to anticipate the location of the ground I want to cast on, as I will not have a clear view while my target location for the cast is covered or obscured by obstacles or walls that will not disappear unless I reposition myself in that exact location. Looks like you are not raycasting to the ground properly at the cursor position. (could be easily fixed by fading out things at the cursor position, not just the character position)

When you cast a spell, the target feels random at best. There seems to me to be no clear indication of whether a minion or a ground corpse is being targeted. Even with the current highlighting, sometimes a minion is prioritised over the highlighted corpse. Also, sometimes my character just weirdly turns +90° and picks a completely different corpse, away from the cursor position.

Long range casting "over corpses" to the edge of the screen is also almost impossible if there are corpses between the cursor position and my character. Nearby corpses will often be prioritised in these scenarios, again completely ignoring my cursor position.

The Minion Command/Direct button:
This feels like a strange band-aid solution to the lack of proper minion AI. I am a long time poe1 player, I understand that you want players to have more active gameplay that requires them to use a variety of abilities and move away from the one-button builds that are vastly overrepresented in poe1. And I like the idea and the direction you are taking with POE2. However, the "directing" feature seems very ambiguous and unnecessary.
For example, when playing Detonate Dead, in an ideal scenario I want to push my minions in front of me and sacrifice them to kill creeps so that I can chain from their corpses. To achieve this as a player, I have to constantly spam the 'direct minion' command and put a DD in between whenever enemies are present. I felt compelled to put the direct minions on RMB. This results in my player input being: spam RMB -> cast DD if enemy is near -> spam RMB -> ...
This feels largely redundant, as my minions could just walk up to the position I left-click and intend to walk up to in the first place as long as they are not actively engaged.

I now have a two-button build, and the frequency of input required to play smoothly makes me reluctant to use any more skills on top (apart from the occasional curse or offering).

Also, in terms of ambiguity, I have not yet been able to tell if the directing feature only tells minions to reposition themselves, or if it also tells them to attack where I direct them. Sometimes, clicking just a few pixels next to a monster's mesh (to redirect some minions left behind, for example) will cause minions already attacking a mob near the cursor to cancel their attacks. (The directing feature also existed in Last Epoch, where it felt terrible on many minion builds, and especially on pure Golem builds, as many players there pointed out during the betas and playtests.)

WASD input as an alternative:
I simply do not want to be limited to 8d movement with WASD, and I do not want to use a controller to get around that limitation. I am a PC gamer, not a console gamer.

In general, you wanted to make the game more accessible to new players. How Minions made it into production in its current state is beyond me, the gameplay feels haunted by anti-patterns and very clunky. This is compounded by the sheer number of horrible layouts (looking at you, Mire, Vaal Factory, ...) and/or the far too frequent placement of unnecessary obstacles (e.g. Willow) in my opinion. With the current endgame i also can not avoid playing those layouts unfortunately.

I like the game a lot, but imo those topics will need a lot of work. And a clear direction.

Cheers