Early game repetativeness

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with this genre. On one hand, roguelikes are amazing. They are very mentally stimulating compared to most singleplayer games out there, wins feel earned and incredible, there's usually a huge amount of content in them (character creation, spells, weapons, enemies etc.,), and its so easy to see the passion in these games from the devs, due to the extremely niche category of roguelikes not really being the choice of game for devs that are in it solely for the money.

However, I was playing some DCSS yesterday, and while dying over and over again in either dungeon or lair trying to make a certain character work and getting somewhat frustrated, I had somewhat of an epiphany.

In roguelikes, due to their very nature, you're going to spend most of your time in the early game, and this begins to feel VERY repetitive when you couple this with the fact that early game variety tends to be pretty bad. Lower variety of weapons, spells, enemies, items, etc. When I was on my DCSS trance yesterday, I got so sick of seeing the same 10 enemies over and over again, and it made replaying it that much harder each restart. Procedural generation REALLY does not matter in the grand scheme of things, it all starts to become familiar very fast. There's a reason why "auto-explore" is so popular.

At least in some roguelikes (like in DCSS hilariously enough), you can force some variety in to tone down the repetitiveness by picking a different character, but it still doesn't solve the fact that there is a plethora of content late game that some players very rarely, if ever, get to interact with before they need to get good or get lucky, depending on the roguelike, player, or character situation. Hell, even good players probably spend a good chunk of time in the early game compared to the other parts of the game. And then there are some players who improve VERY slowly, so they suffer to see the boring early game content over and over and over again. I think this is why meta-progression has become more and more popular in roguelites as well, some people just want to see something new after a while and roguelites tend to provide that in some form with a guarantee.

Obviously, roguelikes are not designed to be your typical game that you'll grind away at for hours if not days at a time. I think it helps to tone down the repetitiveness when, if you lose, you don't just immediately start up another run, but you play/do something else for a while until you decide to come back to it the next day or whenever. Or, like I mentioned earlier, you play a different character with a different playstyle, but not all roguelikes have this option, and this doesn't solve the other early-game variety problems I mentioned earlier. I dunno, what do you guys think? Thank you for listening to my rant. I understand its not another "what roguelike would be good for me" post but I hope I'm not stepping out of line by sharing some of my frustrations instead, even if I do love the genre.