pretty much played lance mainly, though i used dual blades a fair amount due to the tremendous annoyance of trying to fight enemies like gravios and garuga with weapons that can't avoid bouncing very easily in the midgame and not really wanting to sink a lot of resources into ranged sets during the part where everything felt tight. the fact that coincidentally water works on both of those and making a water spear was painful (if not as bad as ice...though at least that was worth it) really made that one investment in the water swords really pay out in the end, even if i think the weapon is a little boring. though i think hunting horn is funny even though the song mechanic is awful (they last forever and are way overbalanced so i guess it balances out how jank they are to play) and the weapon basically has two usable moves. lance feels great though, i liked playing it in rise because it was like "yeah that didn't look like much but i know i played super well there" and it's fundamentally about the same except that charge is relatively way stronger and cheeses a lot of enemies to an unreasonable degree. that alone makes up for not having the sweep/charge sweep from rise, and i don't even really like the wirebug moves that lance has anyway, they just feel finicky and distracting so not having them was hardly anything to complain about.
the first big tigrex fight was kind of the turning point in me actually starting to understand the game, because after i barely pulled through it once by using up almost everything i could think of i decided to check it out in the arena to try and understand it better, and was just completely stumped by the idea that greatsword (in particular) could fight against the thing at all. so after an hour or so i finally looked up a youtube video and actually seeing the more in and out pace that you have to do (at least solo) really helped me put it together. which is not to say that it was the last or biggest wall by any means, because oh my god, the quest with the two diablos near the end of low rank was really too much, definitely the point where i really, really thought about giving up on the game. (then later i made a couple weapons to look at their upgrades and accidentally saved, and that kinda stung too when i had such a small amount of money, though i eventually realized i hadn't used anything particularly rare at all and i might well eventually end up using them anyway, so...)
after all that shit the giant crab was a pretty anticlimatic boss, though it kind of led into how high rank felt mostly not that much harder at first due to all of the enemy types massively downranking. except for the quests where everything has attack values set twice as high so you just get one-shot when they go in rage mode if you mess up. hahaha. i pushed through 7 mostly pretty quick, and 8 wasn't that much harder except for the wounded garuga (i didn't fight one in low rank and wasn't ready for how many awful tricks it has). nargacuga wasn't too bad at all with lance, even though i think it's obviously supposed to be much harder than tigrex for most weapons since it's faster and doesn't always move in straight lines. but you can charge through it, and can't get caught in some of the weird death situations, like getting caught under its wing or blocking something like a roar at a bad time. (the only thing that's truly unsafe to try and turtle is the 180 tail flip, but that's only because it can hit on the wrong side sometimes; the recovery is so long that you can always flee and heal if you didn't get killed by it)
9* was the point where i realized i'd truly fallen behind and that trying to jump straight from azure rathalos armor to the next tier of the same one was not going to work, so i ended up backtracking and grinding for quite a while to raise up gear since i could see what most of my options were going to be, while also waiting for some of the village items (particularly rare scarabs) to trickle in. also, i guess you have to kill a certain number of things anyway to get the quests for metal dragons to appear so apparently i was going to have to grind that out one way or another. but after i'd finished all that and gotten my shiny kushala poker, i was able to beat rajang, kirin, and even the ludicrous one-horned diablos that does a bunch of stuff none of the earlier ones do and has an ungodly health total, then i used the kirin stick to poke a bunch of dragons out and the last fight appeared. i thought it was gonna be awful and i did restart pretty quick after i died the first time in a few minutes, but in the end it was KINDA just sitting under it and stabbing it as much as possible like the other things that are too big to fit on a screen. it's a lot more dangerous than those other ones, and a little more fun, but in the end not even close to the biggest obstacle in the game.