The Tavern

The first three branches are found in reverse order in regards to their difficulty. The easiest branch, the hive, is found last. The hardest branch, the mines, is found first. This leads to spoiled players having a huge edge which is against the games philosophy. The recent changes to the mines makes this even worse.

Also after reaching the hive you're almost guaranteed to have poison resistance... which is part of the reason it's the easiest branch. If the hive was earlier it wouldn't be as easy since you'd probably lack poison resistance at that point.

Imagine for a moment how much smoother the game would be if the the branch order was the lair, hive, then mines. For one having the hive earlier presents a unique challenge to players instead of being a boring time sink, gives more play style options to vegetarian players, and just makes sense.

Now let's be honest about the lair. It's almost trivial because by the time you get to it you've already fought stone giants and unseen horrors and the only thing that can really compare are the death yaks at the far bottom of the place.

Finally the mines, if put deeper, could always be bumped up in difficulty to be harder than the things outside it. It's the most flexible branch for that and probably the most rewarding seeing as all that gold is there. Even if you just compare the loot from different branches it's clear to see that the vaults has more than the mines, which has more than the lair. The hive is quirky and it's mainly a food source and fits somewhere in the middle (thought is clearly out of place between the mines and the vaults).

Hive is on the chopping block for removal, so it is a non-factor.

Lair is not clearly easier than Orc. Many builds prefer to go Orc first, and aside from the gold you are nearly guaranteed a moderately adequate weapon and body armor there. You do have to go in with some available escape options, and teleport scrolls won't do the job even as well as they normally do, but this applies to every major branch. And yes, if you see a nasty unique or powerful monster you'll have to change plans and go somewhere else until you can handle it. Unfortunately the levels of Orc are usually too disconnected to bypass uniques, so once you withdraw you're probably done for a while.

Lair is filled with fast monsters that you can't easily escape and most dangerous monsters resist debilitating status effects by virtue of their massive hit dice totals. Charging in without considering your resources is no more prudent than entering Orc the moment you see it with a similar lack of thought.

I'd like to point out that doing Hive before Lair or Orc isn't really the no brainer you make it out to be, regardless of what's planned for the branch.

First up, you are in no ways guaranteed rPois, and while this is manageable, it is by no means negligible. Secondly, if you dive strait for the hive, I find you run the risk of overconfidence. When you take the branch apart on a regular basis you forget that at a certain point crowds of bees are a fast, significant threat in mele, rPois or no rPois.

Ditto what KoboldLord said on Lair vs Orc. If you really need a branded weapon or so armor, you're short some gold, you're playing a Beogh-ite (or want to covert to one), or if you really need a shop to generate, Orc is the place to be. Sure, there's the risk the entrance will be camped by Priests, but you can have horrible things (well, not literally) spawn by the Lair:1 stairs too.

Orc also happens to be a pretty good place to go looking for the things in the early game capable of banishment, in case you were looking to goad them into getting you into the abyss wicked early.

Um...

If the hive is removed then spriggans will starve to death. I guess you could add more bee vaults but do you honestly want to run into a bee vault every few floors? It'd get old fast. Also I never suggested doing hive first. I was just pointing out that having it last makes it trivial because you're likely to have poison resistance at that point making it the easiest branch.

Minmay I like your idea a lot. I would also be nice if players are told which branches contain runes and if it was made mode clear what runes are for. How's this:

Before entering a branch you are given a message:

"[Shoals] is a [medium] difficulty branch containing a rune needed to enter Zot." or "[Lair] is an [easy] difficulty branch."

It would also be nice if when the game is started it is made clear that 3 runes are needed to enter Zot and acquire the orb.

Nothing in lair confuses and smites you from a distance!

I think that most players take most builds to the lair first. Maybe I'm wrong about this. But if so then I support this suggestion.

What purpose does having a banch entrance OOD relative to the difficulty of the branch serve? Crawl need not give explicit signals about the difficulty of branches, but OOD branches actually give inaccurate signals, on average. This suggestion would prevent plenty of newbies from dying in O1 because and entrance popped up on D7.

I don't think that a statement like "let that be a lesson to skip it if it's dangerous!" is a good reason to support keeping the entrance to the mine before the entrance to the lair. ACrawl is an exercise in learning when running is better than fighting. They'll learn that lesson if Orc is on D1 or D13 because of grinder and sigmund and gnolls on D1 and orges on D3 and orc priests on D4 and centaurs on D6 and cyclops on D9 and....

It's the punch that kills, not the poison.

Hive will be changed in one way or another. See https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:branch:hive for discussion -- no need to repeat it here.
Orc was improved in several ways: no more disconnected bubbles; higher shop generation rate; guaranteed mall on Orc:4 (although that's for later in a game). Lair has become a bit harder with the level cuts and has no shops at all.
Which branches have runes is indicated (or should be -- if not, file a bug report, please) in their descriptions, press ?/B. The goal of the game is told in the manual.

Hive is a good place to stash your loot at the mid D-levels.

Lair 1 isn't that far away. I like the hive but I could see it as a portal vault.

As far as Lair vs Orc goes, as a MC or Evaporate caster, especially if I don't have a (reliable) Lv. 4+ zap spell, I'll often dip my toes in Orc first. I'll usually do my best to explore as much of Orc 1-3 as I can, staying out of Orc 4. Especially if the dungeon has a fair number of shops. Orc also gives the option of finding a long blade... Once I start Lair I do it right to the bottom.

There's real choice there, IMHO.

One thing I do pray for every game is Lair + Orc before the first unseen horror. You can usually count on sInvis by the end of Orc or Lair... Unseen Horrors (or whatever they are) are deeply and profoundly sexually attracted to my casters in big open spaces.