This is definitely one of the weirder missteps by From.

I'd like to know what the decision looked like internally, because I somewhat refuse to believe they just overlooked it.

It's rather amazing that this one guy keeps churning out fixes for FromSoft's complete inability to understand multiplayer.

That said, I do plan to try the vanilla setup first (finishing up Shadow of the Erdtree before we change over). I just worry about my wife and I dropping into a session and having some rando who either wants to faff about; or, we run into the type of toxic behavior which seems to inundate online games. We had pretty good luck with Vermintide 2, back in the day. But, with way too many years of playing WoW, we've also run into a lot of assholes. And we just don't have the patience for that sort of thing anymore.

I mean the game doesn't have any sort of text or voice chat so people can't be very toxic. At most they'll run off and get themselves killed or disconnect, which from what I hear isn't too uncommon.