Nice to see some good talk about Dark Souls 2 here. I never understood the hate against it, I loved it, it definitely has the best gameplay in the entire series, so much possibilities. It had the best balance (even more if you are into PVP), a lot of build variety, and my personal favorite weapon in the series, the twinblades (and the santiers spear in particular, it's like 4 weapons in one with super smooth movesets).
If people only dislike it because Miyazaki wasn't involved... I think it's a dumb reason, and a biased argument.
I definitely can understand being disappointed by the level design not being as good as Dark Souls 1 (well, the first HALF of dark souls 1 actually), and some transitions between areas were dumb, but Dark Souls 3 level design really wasn't as good as 1 either, it was mostly seperated zones with teleport / elevators and such to go from one to the other, and with the instant bonfire teleport right from the beginning of the game, removing the dangerous exploration feeling of dark souls 1. So I really don't think 3 was better than 2 on that point, it was just prettier but that's it. Dark Souls 2 had a much better gameplay in general.
(I also hated how Dark Souls 3 totally broke the balancing across the builds, everything is fast, even heavy weight builds, so because of this you don't have any advantages in playing dex / speed build anymore, it's just raw strenght for the win in this game, which made the pvp really boring.)
If Elden Ring can take what was best in each episode, it could make for a great game. The gameplay will be different for sure, the jump button alone will make it feel different.