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In the lead up too the PF2 player test I read about resonance and I am not a fan of it and this is coming from someone who has no problem restricting things in his games.
Put simply its clunky, annoying and it gives the charisma based classes a huge leg up all other things being equal.
it also fails to address the main problem which is easy and cheap access to magic items. This was actually made worse in Pathfinder compared with 3.5 where you had to at least pay exp to craft magic items.
A wand of CLW for example is not broken, the ability to buy or craft it is. A wand of CLW in AD&D for example is not broken and it would actually work OK in 5E as well due to the changes made to wands and it would not be that drastically different to a Staff of Healing.
The wands existence makes writing an adventure very had and generally people seem to think the Paizo ones are to easy. Wands of CLW contribute to that as in effect each battle has to be rocket tag or every fight is way to easy which ultimately leads to boredom. In both cases the DM is probably not having much fun. In rocket tag he has to work hard to create encounters to challenge the PCs, if the game is to easy he is not really there to do anything except rolling dice for the players to plow through the NPCs.
If you like playing Pathfinder but are struggling to find a GM/DM, don't want to DM yourself or can't find a DM that is a contributing factor. The complexity of running the damn game is also another one. If your PFS has collapsed locally because of 5E that would be another example. If none of that applies to you that is great but if you have seen it or elements of it well its a factor. Also if you think the great Paizo AP's would run better with more casual type PCs using a default array and not optimised so much you are probably right.
10 years ago it may have been a good idea but unless you were very young you are probably coming up to 30 years old or more which means wife, job, mortgage, kids etc all eat into your gaming time. nd new players are not so big on complexity in general and this applies to video games as well(Tetris vs Europa Unversalis, Mario vs Civilization series etc.
The cheap and easy magic items thing is endemic to 3E and 4E but 4E toned down the power of magic items a lot and ultimately made them boring but once again it made the assumption that letting players buy them was a good idea. Player agency is fine up to a point but then you have a problem of the inmates running the asylum. Think of most sports that have strict rules, those rules exist for a reason. Its not legal in Baseball to use the bat as a weapon (Fallout 4 maybe).
Around about now some of the hard core players might disagree with me, the argument is that Pathfinder is all about options. I would agree but that was never the intent of 3E to begin with. When they designed 3.0 the idea was to remove some of the restrictions AD&D had. This was things like racial limits, level limits etc which often made no sense. Level limits are a prime example why not just design a better human?
IN hindsight a few of those things were a mistake IMHO and they have been trying to fix it ever since at least from 3.5, 4E, Pathfinder and 5E have all made efforts. What became the "3.x playstyle" was actually an aberration it was never intended. For example apparently when they tested 3.0 they hardly tested above level 10 and played it like a less restrictive 2E AD&D with more options. Being able to buy and sell magic items was intended to stop the DM screwing you over, it was not meant to enable easy access to everything and even in 3.0 they still had "ask the DM" for custom magic items.
So how did the "3.x" play style evolve and why have I put brackets around it. Well the problem is there has been a divergence in how forum posters play or assume D&D/Pathfinder is played and how most people IRL actually play. Going by forum chatter for example you would have assumed that 3.5 was a horribly bloated mess that was only played by power gaming munchkins who own every book in the game and enjoy building Pun Pun or whatever. In practice most players probably own very few source books, do not visit the forums and as late as 2014 I havbe seen people play Pathfinder as a glorified 2E AD&D who don't even use the wands of CLW. Its not as if 3.5 or Pathfinder put up signs in the DMG saying "use these wands" nor is it readily apparent by reading through the books that you should.
If you are a member of forums, here or the old WoTC forums or wherever perhaps in organised play sure you know about this. I think this is a reason 4E tanked they fixed the game for problems forum users had but the community at large did not know about or did not care about. A lot of the min/maxing that occurred online was theory crafting IMHO although I am sure some games were ruined by Incantrixes or Shadow Adepts or Spelldancers etc. The only 3.5 class that was easily broken was the Druid were the class by itself was broken combined with the natural spell feat which was kinda of obvious and commonly picked.
You had to work a bit harder to break the Cleric and Wizard and know how to do it via spells, feats, splat books etc. Even back then we ran power builds but very few of them came from the forums and I was about the only one who had a vast amount of 3E books at the time- other groups had the core books, an adventure or 2 and maybe a few splats.
So every version of 3.X and D&D since 3.0 has been toning stuff down in a variety of ways. Is it wrong to like the amount of player agency 3.X gives you? No absolutely not but it was not intended and makes the game harder for GMs/DMs. Its not even universal to the 3.x players.I am not saying you can't have options but its how those options interact with the rest of the game, how big the gap is of those options and how easy/hard they make the game to run thats a bit different. Its actually an aberration, was not intended and evolved out of the D&D online hivemind. As early as 2001 we had a wizard nicknamed Xerox due to his ability to mass produce scrolls of haste- 3.0 haste lol.
Just by having micro feats as an option for example you are going to have a very different game than 5E. The more options you have the more complexity you are going to have and if 80% or 90% of those options suck whats the point? Right now for example even PF players are struggling with the existing PF2 material. 2 and 3 hours to create a character. Resonance contributes to that and its a band aid for some bad decisions (in hindsight) made in the late 90's that every edition of D&D/Pathfinder has backed up on. Cheap and easy access to anything you like is the culprit and it reduces the excitement of finding magic items as you will just sell them for half price to get what you actually want. When a Holy Avenger is an OK weapon there might be something wrong.
Both me and my GM do read forums, look at builds, and even enjoy theorycrafting crazy things. However we pull our punches in game mostly because he's been a GM for about as long as I've been alive and knows how to deal with anything short of Pun Pun. We regularly talked about magic item rules and their many problems as well as the expectation of WBL. Then I played in a level 12 one-shot using the automatic bonus progress from the unchained book for the first time and it was the most liberating experience in a while since my core numbers were taken care of and still had plenty of money for actually interesting items. As a result, I found a bunch of items that I had repeatedly overlooked because they didn't have the cost effectiveness of core stats but became worthwhile once they were no longer overshadowed.
While I don't bring out full 100 damage per hit munchkin builds, I do pick the good options and feats for my character's central theme. That alone is enough to wipe the floor with any of the adventure paths. For example, a level 6 fighter who took Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Many Shot with a +1 composite longbow and +1 mithral chain would overperform what the AP's are expecting.
I'll be honest, I don't think your implied suggestion doesn't solve the problem since the party will just pressure the wizard or cleric to take some crafting feats to open up the magic shop and it is really hard to answer "Why can't I craft this item exactly as it is in the book?"
The core problem is the internet age. Imagine you're someone a bit inexperienced but understands basic rules and you want to try out a druid but don't have a good handle on the class. So you search "Pathfinder Druid Guide" and the first hit will tell you enough make an optimized character relative to the AP's. This is a problem that crops up in different ways across many different genres of games. Do you design the game around people who are not good at it or people who are? RPG's have hit a point where they need to start designing around people who are not complete newbies. There needs to be AP's that are hard and require a degree of optimization to survive the encounters. For the new players, they can still make the casual AP's; but experienced players will want more.