One thing I have noticed with the new despair is that it seems to count relationship EE gains in the tally. I've been triggering Despair (needing 34-40 or so since it's just the first couple of loops) after the first 'real' fight which involves a decent commander and a bunch of T1 and T2 breaks. They get 5 each, so 15 purely from downtime actions. The rest seems to come from breaking multiple Core T1/T2s to advance relationships. I guess I've never thought of them as downtime actions, but maybe it's a bug?
Presumably that means boss fights will be more difficult to break with Despair due to lacking relationship EE gains. Not a huge concern honestly, but now Despair shares the usual state of being able to finish the loop but having to grind out the EE to buy the final battle. Rather than that PLUS hundreds of extra EE. So I like the change thus far.
It is a bit of an incidental distortion though, since you don't need to aim for it. Other than not purposefully breaking a bunch of MOR and INN tiers I guess. You're not going to accidentally lock yourself out of it, and will likely trigger it eventually as you're playing through the loop.
One other thing to note is that once you've hit the Despair trigger it doesn't seem to go away if you do more MOR and INN breaks so you can aim to hit it first with a low threshold then go for those breaks that you want/need.
Having said that, I'm only in the very early stages of campaign (Up to loop 4). IE seeing what my first few items are and hoping to get some specific punishers for a forsaken worth keeping.