I'm guessing this release is just a way for the dev to hit the promised release date (Halloween), not to gather feedback. The real source of feedback the developer actively listens to must be the patrons who get access to the Patreon builds. The problem is, gathering feedback from the Patreon members isn't the most viable strategy, as those people who pay for the locked builds are psychologically more biased towards supporting the dev's decisions ("I'm paying for this from my wallet, so I might as well justify my spendings") instead of giving valid criticism. The result is us ending up waiting a year for the build that was subtly sabotaged by the dev's suboptimal way of engaging with the community instead of delivering shorter release cycles for the public builds for everyone to voice their concerns, vote in opinion polls, etc and gathering diverse, uncontaminated data.
Viewing post in How to return the old controls in 0.9.0???
Probably right but even so there's a lot of people on their patreon, so that's a lot to listen to. Have you been on their discord? They have forums open for specific aspects that people can discuss in length. One of them is the likes and dislikes regarding the update. One of the things I've been seeing mostly in a lot of these discussions, one even with a poll, was the controls. There is a push to having a wider range of custom controls, which in my opinion would fix a fair amount of complaints. The other one to address would be the mandatory tutorial which people are also expressing some annoyance on the discord.
I don't think they're getting their feedback ONLY from their Patreons, but it would make sense to prioritize them until it's released to the public.
Regardless, we'll all have to wait and see what they'll do with everybody's response.