Your concerns aren't bad or anything, but they seem pretty common for newer players who think they are bashing their head against a brick wall to progress.
First and foremost, buying gold does NOT appear to be a common practice at all. Maybe some people do it, but hardly anyone I've talked to or played with does that, and I've been around for a while, as far as the game's lifespan is concerned.
Characters used to cost twice as much as they do now, and gold acquisition used to be WAYYYYYYYYYYYY slower, with only 1 mission in the game giving more than 7k gold, 10k with an antag (Weapons from the Past. Which is now inexplicably lower rewards than every other mission in the game). I picked up every character up to that point before the Hades update that cut their costs, including Ginebra, who took weeks or months to grind up 360k gold for. Now, the most expensive characters are 180k which will only take a day or two of playing to reach, if that, depending on how long you play at a time. I'm sorry but I don't consider that all that long of a grind to get a character, or some sort of nefarious "trap" to make gold buying a common practice. Character cost and the grind to afford them used to be the #1 complaint about the game, but that complaint virtually vanished with all the Hades updates.
I too play/played many good F2P (sad that LET IT DIE eventually became a pile of crap
), and I'd say picking up the most expensive characters, with dedicated farming, takes less time than it does to grind for all the parts of, let's say, Nidus or Gara from Warframe. I don't factor in build time like most that complain about Warframe's grind, I just know that it took way longer than a couple of days of mindless grinding the same missions to get certain frames. Ivara took WEEKS to finally get, because RNG. Equinox, Knux, and Hema.... Hema forced me to drop my moon clan down to mountain. Comparing the grind between games is totally fair, and I'd say that the grind is not that bad now.
The gold grind on this might seem slow at first, but it is predictable at least and the only RNG in the game is blueprint drops, which will eventually just happen and aren't something to stress over, and card drawing, which is somewhat controlled by the affinity system. The card rolling can definitely be better, but it's not that bad in the long run.
My recommendation to you is to group up with other players. Playing this game with a pre-made group is significantly more fun than solo queuing. It will frustrate you less, and have lower chance of getting into a party with bad ping, disconnecting players, etc.
Level up rewards could definitely be improved. The end game right now is a lot of gold grinding because weapons cost so much to build. Getting blueprints truly isn't a problem, it's affording them all! It really doesn't take that long though to grind up for what you really want to use, it's just that there's a fair amount of characters, weapons and cards to obtain now that yes, it will take time to get *all* of it, but that's true with any of the other games you mentioned or any other game ever. I've got thousands of hours into Warframe and still don't have anything... used to, but fell behind during Plains.
Voice/text chat is one of those no-brainers, not sure why they haven't added it yet since it's very common criticism.
And finally, pretty sure everyone agrees that the blueprint competition reward that enables players to walk away from a 30 minute mission with NO REWARDS should be #1 priority on things to change. It's awful and was the first thing that put a sour taste in my mouth the first time I played this game, had a bad review posted up for months until I saw some really positive changes for the better with the Hades update. The devs do listen and have come a LONG way since launch, just gotta remember the game is still in infancy, and they are an indie dev team working on a very high production value multi-platform project. I'm willing to bet we will see a lot of major improvements when the 4th campaign drops, just like they did with Hades.
