I'm noticing a really common beat from the Divinity fans who are newer to D&D in these threads. They seem to be unaware of how tightly tuned 5E was, or why it's that way.
5E was extensively playtested, and things like action economy, AC, concentration, spell utility on cantrips, were all very carefully tuned to address a number of issues that 3E had, and they were so carefully tuned because the edition before it, 4E, was widely regarded as an embarrassing step in the wrong direction. Hot off the heels of failure in the eyes of the core fan, 5E easily represents the most thoroughly designed, logically coherent, and statistically validated edition of D&D to date by orders of magnitude. The inclusion of keywords, the use of balance matrices, the D&D Next qualitative feedback reviews all shine through in the precision of the wording and the crunching of formerly wild systems down to manageable levels (and good riddance to DC 80 checks.) The elements of the systems D&D fans are upset about here are lynchpins to the overall balance of the game as levels progress. If strange disparities in power and balance are arising at level 1-4, they will only spin out to make later level balance pretty wacky, to put it gently.
Let's take the -2 to AC from the acid surface, doesn't seem like a big deal, right? Well keep in mind that an Ancient Red Dragon in 5E has an AC of 22. This is because of a design doctrine often referred to as "bounded accuracy" which boils down to "your to-hit and AC won't increase much as you level up," or "bonuses to AC and to-hit should be rare." But now you have a cantrip which leaves behind a surface that reduces one of the toughest monsters in the game's AC by 10%. And you're learning it at level 1.
