So I managed to put in half an hour—enough to get an elementary whiff of the satisfaction in improving, learning from mistakes, pushing forward slowly but incrementally, and poking my nose into alternate paths where I was immediately smoked. Initially I was put off by the controls because they reminded me of every reason I dropped Skyrim, but once I got a grip on using the lock-on everything was much better: at the very least, it's unlike Skyrim in that the third-person movement actually handles like third-person and not like first-person with a pulled-back camera.
I was interested in Dark Souls to begin with because of its reputation for strong exploratory 3D world design (something to fill the void left by Metroid Prime) and its outsized influence on the progression structure of more recent games I admire tremendously. That hasn't changed, and I've kept in mind the warnings in this thread that it doesn't demo well, and that the introductory experience in the real game is supposedly smoother. I'm well aware that I've barely seen the game and am in no place to form a fair impression, and I wish I had a few more hours to dig into it today and see if it clicked. I can already see a hint of why the progression might be highly satisfying over a long stretch.
Still, I think I may put this on the back burner. I'm weighing Dark Souls against two other last-generation ports that release within a week of it (TWEWY and Valkyria 1) and I think one of those will have to take priority. Might even play Salt and Sanctuary first, as I'm more comfortable in 2D, although that lacks the thing that interested me in Dark Souls in the first place, the 3D world layout. The port quality seems acceptable to me as a neophyte, though; no performance issues, and it looks fine to me on the small screen, though enemy health bars are a little hard to make out.
The A/B situation is an absolute deal-breaker, but I have strong opinions on button layouts to the extreme that I won't buy an Xbox because of the reversed ABXY, and won't use that layout on PC either. If I'm on a Nintendo platform, there is a right way to handle confirm/cancel, and I shouldn't ever have to acknowledge that an alternative convention even exists. How nobody caught this up to this stage boggles the mind—wouldn't it have at least shown up in impressions of earlier Switch builds this summer?—but let's hope it's fixed for the release (like Shovel Knight was when it made the same mistake at launch), because until then, no sale.