I'm not some DS master. I did finish Demon's Souls, but I always die when a player invades my game. Nor have I ever gotten the hang of parry & riposte. I'd say I'm average, at best.

But I'm finding all that talk leading up to the release of Dark Souls about it being a much tougher game, was just talk. In my experience, it's a lot less harsh. At least at the beginning (I'm partway into the sewers).

• Not being human is no big deal. Your item drops aren't as frequent, your curse resistance is down and you can be invaded. That's all. In D's Souls being a Phantom sucked since you only had 1/2 your HP. But the item to turn human was rare, so you'd spend most of the game as a phantom with low HP just to be safe. One-hit deaths were far more frequent because of this.
• Having flasks refilled at bonfires, healing is always within reach. And since humanity seems pretty easy to come by while just fighting, I always kindle my bonfires and have 10 flasks. In the last game, it was sometimes possible to run out of healing grasses if you weren't careful.
• I'm sure it gets brutal later on (I'm only past the Gaping Dragon) but so far the bosses have been pretty forgiving in comparison with Demon's Souls. Most have aren't that aggressive, some have pretty ineffective moves, and they don't play very defensively allowing me to just spam the attack button. I've beaten most with very sloppy fighting.
• Maybe because I'm already familiar with how to play, but I find I'm progressing at a nice steady pace in Dark Souls. There's a good forward momentum that was never there in Demon's Souls. I may hit a part where I die a lot, but I'm never stuck for too long. With Demon's Souls however, I spent weeks unable to get past worlds 1-2, 2-1, 3-1 & 4-1 (I wouldn't even touch world 5).

As such, it seems Dark Souls is a much more accessible game than the last one was. Has anyone else found a more forgiving game, despite claims to the contrary?

You are very much right. Dark Souls does not vary anywhere too far off Demon's Souls. The whole "open world" talk and stuff, it all pretty much still grounds down to the same thing in Demon's Souls.

As for boss fights, I have been to say the least, relatively disappointed. I'm about nine bosses in and there has only been two fights that I have enjoyed and thought was well designed.

I totally agree. Dark Souls is far more forgiving than Demons Souls, because being "dead" is not that big of a deal. I avoided most of the news on this game prior to release in order to keep everything a surprise for when i played it, and I was shocked to find that the game gives you health flasks that can be constantly refilled. Also, not seeing the health bar cut in half surprised me too. Granted it is nice to be alive so you can summon people into your game but I think they made being "dead" too easy and so i never really feel like joining someones game to get my life back. Other than that I do enjoy the level design and the enemies much more than Demon's Souls. As for the bosses, I think they feel easy or poorly designed because they are choosing to make the bosses gigantic, so they have to be kinda bad at fighting you or else you would never kill them. I'm hoping there are some smaller bosses so the fights can be more tactical/difficult like the Knights.

I used the Cling Ring, so being in soul form was actually more beneficial to my play style than being in human form.

Haven't played dark souls so i cant talk about that but the boss fights in Demon's Souls over half of them involved sitting back and just shooting them with magic or arrows where you couldn't even really get hit, unless you went a melee hero then it was actually sort of difficult. As for the healing items it was extremely hard to run out of healing herbs in Demon's Souls it was always more of the can I safely heal myself and not die then managing the herbs themselves, I guess you could say the different ranks of herbs gave you some sort of micromanaging of the herbs. The item to revive you also was not that bad I think for the most of my first play through i had over 10, though dying does not sound as terrible as it did in the first game.