I have used Karndean loose lay vinyl floor planks with good success. No adhesive and very easy to cut with a simple box cutter. It's not cheap, but when you remove the installation cost you would have had to have paid someone to install a regular flooring product, I thought the pricing was okay. A lot of colors to choose from and it looks great, no one thinks it's vinyl.

You had a THICK engineered hardwood before installed directly over the plywood substrate. Now you have a THIN 6.5mm vinyl floor (cork attached). But you have had to add cement board over that subfloor because you needed a floor height raise to get the doors and trim to work. Your old engineered was NOT sitting on cement board (which is not structural and would need WORK....patching...sanding...etc). So the comparison between one floor and the other isn't fair...there have been plenty of changes. Subfloor preparation is separate from installation labor. It can and SHOULD cost $1 - $5/sf for subfloor preparation (not including the cement board). How much was installed? Are there transition strips between doorways? How much space was left at the walls? A bit more information would help. And normally you do not glue down a floating vinyl floor. This particular one has NO INSTRUCTIONS for adhesive. That's a very TELLING sign. If the planks have cork backing, then normally are NOT glued. Your best bet is to either live with it or pull all of it and have all the prep done and then relay it. But be aware that you will lose as much as 25% - 50% of your planks because the click edge will break.

I am wondering how durable it is and if it is noisy. I would be using the product in my unit that is on the 2nd floor. It is only me and I don't have pets. I always wear slippers and plan to put rugs down anyways. Any other brands that folks recommend for LVP?

Afaik, the only time a floating floor, of any type, goes under cabinets is where the cabinets are up on legs instead of having the base extend down to the floor. A floating floor isn't attached to anything - It is expected to be able to move slightly with differening temperatures and humidity. Regular base cabinets, filled with stuff are too heavy. They prevent the floor from expanding where it should and may cause buckling somewhere else - like in front of your cabinets. In flooring terms, your plank has an underlayment attached - the cork layer. Most planks are manufactured without an attached underlayment so some sort of pad is used. The underlayment provides a bit of sound adsorption but also an interface between an existing floor and the floating floor for expansion and contraction. NuCore does recommend a moisture barrier and over a wood subfloor, they recommend this stuff called "sentinel protect plus underlayment." It's bright blue and fairly thin. It's about 1 mil thick. And yeah, I know they used the word "underlayment". Flooring is just weird. It gets worse because words like underlayment have different meanings with different flooring. Why use different words for different kinds of building products when one will do? After all, it's just stuff under the finish floor. There is no circumstance under which it would be cool to just patch this stuff in with another "underlayment" that has a different height or is of a different type. If the height issue is caused because of a subfloor repair using the wrong height material, your installer should fix that as well.