Title -- sometimes it is a good challenge. Julianna it is hard to sneak up on, is watching over the ostensible target but keeping a quick path to the antenna, keeping an eye out. It makes the map harder. Sometimes I don't think I can get it, so I cut my losses, sneak a hack on the antenna, and get out.

Sometimes Julianna is not great, or makes a mistake and I can get a drop on her, but until then I still treat it like a challenge, and it turns out I got lucky and I get back to the usual PvE loop.

Either of these is fairly fun. There's a period of tension, some encounters, trying to gauge up the best way to approach or deal with it, and then either winning or seeing if I can skedaddle.

Other times if I'm really unlucky I get a hacker, instantly hitting me while I'm inside an enclosed room, then instantly hitting me as soon as I respawn in another building. More often though it is a Julianna that is just way more serious about PvP than I would ever want to be. Like a perfect kit-out where I, just having unlocked infusion, can't take her down with 4 shotgun blasts at close range, and she turns around and takes me out almost instantly. Or she has some speed and jump setup where, with lag, I find myself getting neck-snapped while facing her and shooting with a shotgun. Or getting neck snapped within 10 seconds of coming out of the doors, because I happen to be melee swinging at the third guy in the first pack of enemies.

Or Julianna gets tired of waiting for me, since I'm being careful and quietly getting rid of random enemies to make it easier to move around, so she kills off the target and then quits out, making the whole mission feel kinda pointless on my end.

For these latter encounters it just... isn't fun. Trying to play in some weird way where I have to avoid lagged insta-kills, and none of my kit matters, is just tedious. I don't particularly want to go to offline mode and give even fewer opportunities for people to play Julianna, but these gimmicky loadouts for instakills are just tedious and annoying and feel buggy.

Does anyone find it similar at all?

It just feels weird. As a Cole player trying to get through the story, I'm not loaded out for PvP, I'm trying to sneak or move around the map, or deal with random enemies. There are some neat slabs for dealing with masses of random enemies and sneaking past, but they're not great for these heavy PvP oriented Julianna's. I could kit out to deal with these Julianna's better, but then I'm kinda missing out on some really interesting PvE approaches.

It just doesn't feel all that congruous for me.