FWIW I think nobody really hates the current version of chapter 13. The thing that everyone hated (that I played through pre-patch) was what you are playing now except the ring did no damage so it was basically a stealth game with an extremely drawn out death process if you were spotted. Also Noctis was locked into his walk animation for some reason and you couldn’t sprint. And the checkpoints were really spaced out. It was an interesting idea to suddenly turn FFXV into Soma but at that point in the game I had so completely lost the thread of the plot that I just wanted to get a move on.
Square essentially patched in sprint and the stronger ring within 3 weeks of the game coming out because of the backlash but the legend was already born.