I totally agree with this. Mundane AUs like coffee shop AUs can be a little dry and lack any semblance of plot. But I do love AUs that get detailed about something the author obviously knows a lot about, because then I feel like I'm learning something new and I also can tell the author put a lot of thought into how the characters would fit into that world. Speaking of Hockey AUs, there are some great ones out there. I never watched hockey in RL until fandom introduced me to the sport, lol.

I hope I did enough research to do this AU justice. At least it was fun to do a deep dive and try to bring in elements of other Merlin AUs that I like.