1. Protagonist is cultivating in order to become a literal god.
2. The culture of the region is based on historical Chinese nobility.
3. The top 4 or 5 ranks of the cultivation process are always the same (which I never bothered to learn the names of, outside of nacent soul which is one of the earlier ranks of the top 4 or 5.)
4. There is an established higherarchy of others already training in their cultivation, and there are people far more advanced than the protagonist.
5. It is well established and agreed that the best way to progress in your cultivation is through the training and information you gain from joining a sect, which takes the form of a stupid combination of a Tibeten monastery with the forbidden city. (The Chinese equivalent of Vatican city, except instead of religious leaders it was the government of China that lived there.)
It is the combination of the last 2 that are seriously problematic and damaging to the plot. it's the thing that rail-roads the plot and eliminates all the major threats the protagonist can face, and instead limits the potential threats to a very few that wind up getting repeated over and over again.
Lizy has said a lot about about why your complaint can be valid in some generic cases but isn't actually that applicable. There's a term for cultivators that don't join sects and there are plenty of protagonists do that. Even if they do join, there are different flavors of sects. There's the happy go lucky ones with basically no rule, the stupid places were there's full of bullies that torture the protagonist, the """standard""" ones. There's themed ones like swords, like plants, like music, regional differences. Different goals.
If your idea of a sect is formed by stuffing them all into the single description of "tibeten monastery + forbidden city" there's no wonder you can't appreciate Eastern Xianxia. Sects are more like organizations, like schools, as well as homes. Allied ones can be resting stops where the protagonist experience new things and make new friends while enemies are like fortresses with bosses.
But sure, group them all into monastery + forbidden city. LOL.
As for #4...
"There's an established hierarchy of others already in the level process, and there are people far more high leveled than the protagonist."
"There's an established hierarchy of others already in the training process, and there are people far more skilled than the protagonist."
Wake up. Stratified, tiered systems are far from unique to Xianxia and I have no idea why you're considering it to be so damaging when countless novels use it. Besides, many novels have stronger things and weaker things, with weaker things rarely able to usurp the power of the stronger (duh). Just because xianxia clearly delineates cut-off points for different levels of skill/power doesn't make it any worse.
To put it bluntly, I think you're wrong.
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A better analogy would be comparing Harry Potter to Eragon. Of the two, Eragon was the more interesting and kept your attention better.
Now, imagine if every single writer to open a word doccument all wanted to re-tell Harry Potter and the market was absolutely saturated with Harry Potter clones. This would even further harm the interest in the genre if that was all that magical fantasy ever was.
That's a pretty darn accurate comparison to what Xianxia is for the cultivation concept.
Speak for yourself. Harry Potter is more interesting. Well, i haven't read all of it, but the few bits I did was better than Eragon. Not to mention they're not even the same style of story.
Anyways, Eragon itself is a Star Wars clone, and even if it's not 1:1, it's still a copy of the story plot process that is the Hero's Journey.
One copies the plot, and the other uses a setting as a template. They're both copying and both have the potential to be good or bad.
