Each update seems to have made the game more consistently aggressive without really offering appropriate gear or upgrades to the players to manage the aggression from the enemies.
Either the crew I most recently played with got terrible luck or post anniversary update the spawns seem to have been jacked up to levels that are simply unmanageable, too much metal firing too many shots with not enough health to deliver lead back.
I mean, before the update the worst chain of back to back spawns I had received with another group was 3 being a beacon, jammer and ambush, the last run my current group had experienced, in one sector, a jammer ship, jump buoys, a fighter swarm, I think two corvettes (Definitely at least one) and an exit ambush, all back to back by the time we dealt with the last critical issues (Such as fire or radiation), and the next sector we got a jammer, fighter swarm and corvette, that is 9 events back to back with the pause in between being the main event of the second sector, on the current difficulty 5.
Then there's the issue of enemies being able to snipe through shields (Fortress shields at least) and cause status effects that can shut down the shields immediately, notably making the shield generator critical, knocking out the auxiliary generator supplying it and creating a radiation leak that immediately knocks out the shields, resulting in all 1.7K shield points vanishing in a single tick.
And even if both of those were fixed there's still the issue of the equipment grind, we got a single superior piece of equipment (Orange tier, fourth tier) and it was a flak cannon that had decent all-around stats, but was genuinely outclassed by a blue tier (Second tier) weapon of a different type at the same level.
And then there's the TTK absolutely cratering, which is very bad when the spawns are jacked up to compensate so you wind up in a situation where you can take 30+ points of damage from a single burst ... and there are 8 more of the same enemies (The bipedal ones called raptors to be exact) preparing to blast you, ontop of anything else in the back. Pre-anniversary update I was able to melee a similar horde and come out ontop, but now when a trio can immediately down you, let alone 8 coming out of a doorway, it forces an incredibly evasive and defensive playstyle.
And even ontop of all of this, the artillery objective, which has consistently been problematic still entirely mandates taking anything and everything that boosts speed since you're fighting against a clock with effectively no room for error, even if you can immediately kill the disruptor and grab the objective at each zone, apparently 117% speed (Or something in that realm) isn't enough to complete the travel distance from point to point required on the default ship, and there is a heavier ship that can be unlocked.
And oh yeah they seem to have increased the maximum difficulty to 10 (Where the previous highest was 5), but as far as we could tell keep the difficulty the same meaning 5 is just as difficult as before, and it only goes up from there.
There's also bugs such as (At the time of typing) the pilot getting hit through the cockpit and instantly getting downed, the new materia pistol being only scannable for one person (Not even as post-mission loot) and visual effects suddenly stopping which add more fatigue and roughness to the overall experience.
TL;DR: Balance changes feel like the developers attacking the players rather than trying to craft a fun experience, would've recommended a few weeks ago at the time of typing, do not recommend now on the grounds of it likely getting worse.
The core gameplay potential it's self is fun, but GOD the player should not be treated like the enemy of the devs.
