[2022] Leveling up is frustrating

First off I didn’t complete the “studies” past the first couple since I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t think to ever ping nests in ceilings. I just realized they give you xp and I would have already completed most of the New York one naturally but all of the them were locked out the whole time I was playing.

Also in matchmaking every single game I got the lowest difficulty therefore losing out on +50% XP, I was never able to choose either. Half the time it was a cakewalk and other times the team actually wiped which is saying a lot about the varying difficulty of objectives(and randos I guess)

Reached milestone 3 and tried doing solo cautious difficulty yet ended dying at the end of or after beating an objective because I kept getting the “kill elite” ones or “defend the x” ones and would get swarmed. Instead of still gaining xp I actually lost like 15k XP???

I guess it’s just bad luck but I’m not even close to just unlocking San Francisco now after playing for a few hours already and having fully beaten all 3 NY maps as well as a handful of 2/3 objective runs and several one objective runs.

I expected to be able to play any map I want without having to grind which I just don’t have time to right now. I can only imagine the grind gets much worse