It is not hard if you want to hack one "rank" but with multiple it could be challenging.
And it is true that later in the game I wished "I really hope there will be no acces points..."
But all I miss to make the minigame OK is a perk that would make me plan the way.
Holding 3 four-digit paths on 6x6 table in memory is annoying.
I would hope that RPG helps me there. After all, V is the one with super inteligence.
But I think the minigame itself is pretty good one. Just a bit overused.
If you're playing a netrunner build, the Breach Protocol skill and perk tree can eventually make the hacking minigame ridiculously easy. My current playthrough I'm doing a cyberware-only run, so I'm doing a bit of hacking even though I'm trying to focus mainly on Gorilla Arm melee. Since I'm devoting most of my perks to Athletics, Street Brawling, and Cold Blood, the hacking minigame is pretty challenging and I'm often not able to enter in all of the lines.
But my first playthrough was a netrunner with most of my perks going into Breach Protocol and Quickhacks, and eventually I got it to where each line was only two numbers and the first line was automatically successful. AND I had something ridiculous like 2 minutes on the timer. And since by that point I had a number of quickhacks that added additional demons to Breach Protocol, it basically let me choose which of them, if any, I wanted to apply to the combat. Getting all of them was super easy, but I was able to be selective on which of them I wanted to use. For example, the legendary Weapons Glitch allows you to upload it as a demon in Breach Protocol, but since my character was something of a pacifist and weapons glitches can be lethal, I usually chose not to include that one in the hacking minigame unless I was fighting all robots and drones.
So... I get how people who aren't specced into hacking might find it frustrating, but I think it does exactly what it's intending to do. For people who aren't specced into hacking, it's a bit of a challenge, but for people who are it allows for some additional strategic choices.
As for the person or people who said that they'd prefer just an RNG check.... I personally think this game would be a lot better if most of the RNG elements were stripped out of it. The RNG aspects of clothing and armor are part of what makes the crafting system so crappy, and why save scumming is such a viable solution to so many things in this game. (Side note to developers: with the new generation of consoles using superfast SSDs that make reloading a save trivial, if your game promotes save scumming due to RNG elements, it's just bad design.) Tabletop games tend to use dice to simulate the complexity of trying to do things within an imaginary world, but we really don't need that in the simulated worlds of video games. I really don't think anything would be lost if a gun in CP2077 did a fixed amount of damage with each shot rather than a random amount within a pretty wide range. The things that dice represent in a tabletop game are handled in the process of moving your character, aiming your weapon, and the NPC being able to move around and take cover. So... no. Please don't add more RNG crap to this game.
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