Encounters difficulties don't make sense

I imagine this planned stuff but I have noticed it as an exceptional detriment to my experience.

Franz is struggling to design encounters that are balanced.

I’ve had times where I’m running solo no party and Franz throws 3 Wraiths at me, a single lvl 7. The wraith CR is 5 but they also have a rather deadly attack. It was a near impossible encounter for me.

On the other hand, for the past while I’ve been running with solo PC + 3 NPC party around lvl 7 and 8. The encounters being generated lack both enemy quantity and quality. Things like throwing a single CR ½ at a party of 4 lvl 7s. The encounter before that was a CR ½ and a CR 1.

One of my first actual encounters was a big scary single lvl 3 Necromancer with an abnormally high health pool… He proceed to get smashed by a party of 4 lvl 6 or 7s, I forget which it was at the time.

Particularly with the 4 party adventure, I’ve been going at it for several hours and have had maybe a dozen encounters and every single one of them the enemies were severely under leveled.

Franz seems to be having difficulty looking at the party size and level while generating appropriate encounters.

I know the following bit is a planned feature but just to note it… I can’t even effectively police my own game and increase the difficulty of the encounters as I can’t add monsters to an encounter.

I’ve tried policing the game by saying “oh, this specific enemy” has entered the battle, which Franz understood but it created a weird state where the enemy was in memory but not in the encounter itself.