"The reason is that not much effort was put on France (and most effort actually put was misguided)."
You're welcome to your opinions on whether the content is good or not but it's insulting to say "not much effort" was put into the French Tree unless I missed your name in the credits for the DLC and you observed it's development?
It's even more insulting to assume that a lot of effort was put into France, because that implies that those efforts were intentionally malicious in order to make France gameplay less enjoyable.
You have a super-long focus tree with quite a few filler focus (the industrial tree and the communist subbranch are particularly egregious in that), when the critical moment is late 39-early 40. This mean that most of the "cool things" you can get, by the time you can get them, don't matter.
I understand that France need to be a challenge, and even if I don't like it I can accept the ridiculous number of factory at start and the three research slots as ways to hamper them because the game can't really reflect how France suffered an humiliating loss despite France and Britain combined having at least as much if not more men and modern material in everything except Aircraft compared to Germany.
But the way it is handled is poor. Disjointed government is pretty bad, because almost everything you do before the war cost pp, which mean you're spending 2-3 years doing nothing waiting for it to go away, which mean that basically none of your ministers matter (which is sad because there's a couple of cool unique ones). It is egregiously bad when compared to Spain, for which there's the neat idea of having the buildup to the civil war being handled by decisions. Something similar could have been used for France, to act as a pp sink while still leaving a feeling of choice and doing something to the player.
And the political tensions aren't really represented aside from the "political violence" spirit which just make you wait for taking some national focus (and if you can't wait you can always take another focus to remove it at the cost a few stab. It was a period where L'Action Française was outright calling for Blum to be murdered (and he was violently assaulted in Febuary 1936), and the right-wing press in general was extremely vicious against him. The Front Popular abstained from intervening in Spain partly because of fear of a right wing coup.
Then there's the alt-history path. I will admit I haven't looked much at the Fascist path since I have little interest in it, though at first glance it doesn't seems to be bad. But the Monarchist path, despite being popular, is quite uninspired. The return of the monarchy would deserve more than taking two focus, waiting a year, then taking a third one. The Napoleonic path is just a string of wargoals for vague reasons such as "avenge Waterloo" and go to war with Britain for reasons (also conquering the Benelux and everyone being fine with it). Napoleon 6 was a resistant and war hero, and an interesting figure, he deserves better than simply trying to outdo his great-great-uncle. The Legitimist path meanwhile is lacking in direction, and to a smaller extend so is the Orleanist path past kicking the Fascists asses.
Finally, while I will admit that the gimmick of the industrial tree is kind of neat, it just doesn't work that well for France.
