All right, a bit over 6 hours in and I have still not even touched the main storyline. The new content is on par with high quality tier content from the original Pillars, toying around with fantasy tropes and trying to do the unexpected. Not always succeeding, but eh. Sadly, when I praised the new Dyrwood location for having enemies utilizing entirely new tactics, it doesn't quite apply to White March - while there are some tough encounters, your usual tactics will suffice for the most part. A bit of a shame really.
All of the locations seem to be very concentrated, with a lot of content crammed into them. And that content is actually good, funnily enough.
Aparrently, when you tell the game that you want White March to be high level, experience rewards increase also - I'm almost at lvl 13 with my group. I do hope to find some new talents, aside from the pseudo-multiclass ones (yes, there are multiclass talents in the game now. They're ... Peculiar.)
The expansion introduced a bunch more scripted interactions, and they are generally a lot better executed than those in the original - as in, all of them are actually interactive now, giving you options, and having failure states other than a broken arm. Nice.
Soulbound weapons are a fantastic idea - they're weapons which grow not with experience, but with introducing little optional quests which will allow the weapons to grow if you complete them. They also have pretty neat effects. Actually, generally speaking, White March has some fairly neat equipment effects.
You know, Obsidian never even wanted to address most of the things you mentioned in the first expansion, why would you be disappointed by something which was never promised puzzles me a bit. They were pretty clear on only wanting to add new locations and content associated with them. Anyway:
a) Aggroing one member of a group always aggroed the entire group, in whole Pillars of Eternity
b) You could always only place one trap. Yes, it does suck.
c) The bit where you got your ass kicked? The mage tower, right? It's a high level area which is designed to force you to change your tactics to boot. The multiplying warriors you have so much trouble with - remember that they are monks, and the more you damage them, the more powerful they become. There's a lot of stuff like that which is designed to make you change your spells and use different abilities than what you got used to troughout the rest of the game.
d) There are bounty quests to be found in White March