What exactly is the tone of this game meant to be? The world's meant to be going gown the crapper setting a darker tone, yet characters are making sad little quips, we have a trailer where it's apparently an amazing time to be alive, and now we're getting skins to make the game even more of an embarrassment to the Battlefield name.
My personal opinion is that Dice have been totally messed up by EA and they're just doing as they're told and getting paid and not really showing any care and attention.
I really don't like to brag or whatever, but I used to work for Riot and I did a lot of work on Valorant and League of Legends. Whether you like those games or not - I can tell you first hand, that everybody at Riot played the **** out of those games. Everybody got invited to playtests, had meaningful input - tested them to death, literally lived and breathed the games, from top to bottom and loved it. They also listened like hell, to what the community wanted.
With Battlefield - it now just feels like people who don't really know anything are just imposing their rubbish ideas (like 128 players, specialists as opposed to classes, cringe-worthy voice lines etc), that nobody with any sense would even dare to mention during a design phase.
Like you say, the game has a massive identity crisis. I used to love the feel of the US military going up against Russia, or the UK going up against Germany or whatever, it gave the whole game a serious 'battlefield vibe' that's hard to explain.
Now we have a bunch of woke, cringe, zoomer like characters borderline floss-dancing at the end of each map, it's gross.... Nobody ever wanted it.