I don’t know if there is an answer to this but I am going to try anyways.
Is Season of Ghost book two supposed to have such a dull combat gauntlet? We are on a linear path and it is just one encounter after another and the encounters just aren’t interesting. Especially two which are so obvious it was miserable to be forced into an ambush. Two so far because we still aren’t done with this linear gauntlet.
The current part has broken me. Its too linear with forced fights. I run abomination vaults and in comparison, this is to many fights in too forced a setting. I really want to give my GM a suggestion to spice it up because I am not the kind of person to make a request and leave the GM to do all the work.
I very much recommend chatting with your GM about your concerns. But yeah, the section you're thinking of as written in the AP IS pretty much a linear gauntlet for around 1 character level of advancement. When I GM'd this portion I switched it up with some more RP encounters and some things tied into PC backstories which I think did a nice job of breaking up the linear encounter-after-encounter flow that it has as-written... it was still a fairly linear sequence, but with more varied types of scenes and things that got the party talking and speculating about things in between scenes as well.
For what it's worth, it is the only part of the AP as-written with that extent of a linear sequence to it.