i agree with you on the view of the war within the war. if your ead first hand accounts on the german side, within a couple weeks of invasion the officers close to the battle knew they had blundered. the going in intel was woefully short on russian strength. right away, the germs encounterd 3x the number of divisions they expected.
as for the roads, not sure they fought in that area in first war. i dont think the germans got anywhere near moscow in 1917, but correct me on that
After the German victory at Gorlitz-Tarnow in 1915, the Russians surrendered all of Poland, Lithuania, and about half of Latvia. The front more or less stabilized about 100 miles west of where the front was as of the writing of these articles. But it was apparent in WW1 that the road and rail networks of Poland and Russia were nowhere near as dense or sophisticated as what one would find in Western Europe. Given that the Germans had an “Untermensch” philosophy toward their Slavic neighbors, they couldn’t have expected much improvement in the 20 years leading up to WW2.
And given the road and rail networks the Germans actually found in 1941 west of the Dnepr River, they could not have expected that they would get any better the farther east they went.