At Paizocon they gave the impression they did not care about play balance at all.
What did they say to give you that impression?
If on the other hand your group is full of folks who multilcass Sorcerer/Rogue and take the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat so that they can fight with a nunchaku and need a solid conversation on why following this up with Shield Slam is a bad idea, you might want to tune the encounters down.
And because they way world works, the second group is more frequently encountered in The Real Life, Paizo APs do tend to gravitate towards them in terms of difficulty.
I'll have you know that my Air Elementalist Wizard/Rogue/Arcane Trickster/Swashbuckler actually ended up being competent! It only took her 10 or so levels... (and even more fun, the players have a name for her: Danger Lemming!)
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Danger Lemming! Coming soon to Nickelodeon, featuring the voice of Tom Kenney:-)
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Personally, we have been going through this AP for the past few months, we just finished the first part of book 5 and we have crushed anything we encountered with our DM maxing Hit dices and giving everything an Advance template >.>;
We were all built with 20 point buy and the party consist of a play-test Aether kinetecist, a vanilla tiefling magus and a kitsune rogue(who became unchainex when she could) and once every like 4 games we might see a ratfolk alchemist and human bolt ace gunslinger. Most of the book end fight were underwhelming, especially book 4(and probably book 3 but Ican't remember anything about it to prove my point...
Now as for the story, when we started book 1 it was amazing, we all loved it. Book 2 was a love-hate relationship, I loved the zombie apocalypse. I hated the inefective church of Pharasma. Seriously you got a level 15 cleric who does nothing but sit on her ass and order us to do her job. Book 3 was fun until we left the second city and by then the cult was already innfective vilains. Once we hit the desert though, don't remember if it was end of book 3 or start of book 4 but my will to continue the AP just crashed. I hated the hex exploration in Kingmaker and I hate it even more when I don't have a good reason to spend a day exploring a desert with nothing in it when I'm searching for a pyramid(also its total waste of time thank you book 5). The faceless sphinx was too long and filled with filler encounters. And the book final encounter only had the chance of casting haste on its badly built minions before she got force choked to death. Book 5 started well though a failure on the GM nearly crushed the campaign then and there(I don't care if your a high cleric of pharasma who represent the authority of the Ruby Prince, you don't act like a b***h with the guys who just saved your ass, nor bring up the heritage of the magus who's been thinking himself a paladin ever since you first met him. You end up as a frog and endangering the life of the poor guards who's job is to protect you from the wrath of the guys who just handled the pyramid they couldn't). As for gear, the drops and the city were not that great to keep up. So I bought us a greater teleport ticket to Absalom everytime we had to sell and buy stuff(making sure to always have a scroll at hand for emergency porting)
So all in all, great start, meh middle section, and the end is too see but looks promising
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The middle does slog. My group hexplored west then north in Book 3, finding the Thraie hive early on and headed further north without any ado. I encouraged a bit more exploration in book 4 to get the mecha, but they would have likely found the sphinx pretty quick regardless.
Book 6 can be pretty awesome, and has some of the best traps and enemies yet. If your party is creative, they'll be able to easily overcome most of it, but there are a few things that are beyond great in the AP's finale.