Took about 5 attempts but I beat the Lion boss. The difficulty so far is about what i expected. Challenging but nothing to unmanageable.

I have noticed framedrops in certain areas. But nothing that made the game Unplayable.

My character is NG+ so they're at level 260ish. But I think they're doing a normalization with characters/levels similar to what they do for coop and then using the Sekiro style damage scaling upgrade system with the new items to better scale your character to your progress in the DLC to be more even between players.

Anyways, I'm trying to do my first playthrough of the DLC the way I did my latest playthrough of the game with no tear, coop, or character summons. There was a boss that took me something like 50 tries so I get the difficulty complaints to a degree but that's also kind of what I signed up for with my self-imposed challenge and knowing this is a DLC for a From Soft game, where they really tend to test limits.

The rest of the bosses and mini bosses I've fought are tough but not unmanageable. Ex. The Lion boss took me 4 tries and even the first 3 tries I got through 75% of the health bar. And I'm not crazy good at these games or anything. At first I was getting my butt handed to me more than I was expecting but I realized I was only half-paying attention to things. Now that I'm tuned in again, I'm finding things a lot more manageable.

Same thing as you. Everything is not too difficult especially when compared to some of the challenge from base game. I had performance drops and bugged areas, but not unplayable.

Only issues so far are a few annoying bosses, not letting you play how you want, but as long as it isn't too many, the other bosses have been great.

You lot are making it sound easy, the Dancing lion boss took me no less than 30 tries and I eventually had to use my mimic tear along with the summon. What a spastic moveset with arena wide reach and over the top elemental changes, electricity, air, frost all cycling for the second half but I suppose you'll wouldn't have seen it since ya beat him so fast. It was absolutely no fun nor did I feel any achievement when I beat it, just slight relief. To me, it feels soooo cheapened over the base game, like some amateur indie/AA game where the gimmick is difficulty. This is kinda ruining the base games image in my mind now and it's amplifying the flaws of the base game which were easily ignorable before and paved over by the good aspects. I don't remember such bad frame pacing on bosses though, I guess that's new to the DLC. I'm going to find as many scadutree fragments as I can and see if they make any difference to the next boss, which I assume will be as spastic and annoying as the last cause I wanna get to Messemer and see what the deal is there.

Sorry to say but it just sounds like you kinda suck at the game. I'm not good at these games but I was able to beat that boss on my 2nd try. 

I'm definitely not as zoned in as I was when I left the base game but I don't suck either, I beat all soulsborne no issue and plenty of souls likes with the only boss that really gave me pause to think should I be done with them being Sekiros last boss. This boss was essentially one shotting me with death after two hits in quick succession, there was no margin for error or allowance to get hit. Sure I might as well have been naked at level 1 but with my damage still being decent. 

And that's it for me, I'm now up to (4) on scadutree fragments and still essentially getting one spotted by a shield weilding mob in Castle Ensis. You'd think being 170 would count for something but it doesn't. Can't be arsed respecing so I can handle another hit, Life's too short for this nonsense.

Afro definitely doesn't suck and he ended up breaking his phone, lol.

Truth be told, I've never encountered so much nonsense in any souls game as in some of these bosses. It's like they took all the wrong lessons from the base game.

Overworld has a lot of content but most of it is asset reuse, too, or a step down from the OG game. Makes me think this game is like Dark Souls 2 - made by the newer guys or whatever.

Exactly. I Feel the same.