Oh, well.
Nothing of that problems happened to me.
First reason is I hate to die
so I never died once even doing that step in solo, because i simply used my mount and fast i understood that i just had to move over the spot to catch the required loot, as long as i mounted with the phial in hand. So, don't need to dismount and can run all over the spots pretty fast, checking the paths while timers were up.
I was not interrupted during the NPC talk because before i started the chat, i found a good position IN water that worked, so no animals annoyed me.
Killed by Gerder? You joking, I cannot be killed by him being helped by fellow and powerful guild and faction friends
I only got one issue during the kizoar rite's step about searching and killing lethal kizoar at various OP. It happened in Umbra where one OP didn't triggered the mission for some reason (could have been a lag issue tho, as i also crashed after a while there). Once relogged from crash everything went well.
About Gerder, well i think the 24h timer to do it just give you enough freedom to do something else or logout for a while. You have the time even to fix your gray hair issue with a good potion in real life
About a better text in the Kincher's rite timers, well, i think the devs have tought: "No dev team around the world would have put 30 minutes timer for each of the 12 steps, ending with a nice total of 6 hours doing nothing but wait, so we are sure our nice community will never think we could do that and promptly understand that the timers are just 4, for the spots that have the actual loot!!"
I admit tho, i whined a bit in guild chat before understanding my misunderstanding!
Well, okok, my answer is more a joke than serious.
Serously, even if the rites have some issue, the general concept to have the enciclopedia rites up and running is still a good thing. Only if we have actual content the devs can look and fix the eventual bugs.