0.9 has alot of great addition and changes. The world feels so much more detailed, the art style is more defined, the base is very polished, the new controls are very streamlined, the game's items are so much more optimized, gathering signals is alot more skill based, and there has been alot of work to flesh out key parts of the game like the ATV and Upgrades.

0.9's biggest issue though is the "sinking" cost. While the ATV has tons of upgrades, they are all expensive, and if your unskilled and stupid with your battery like most people have been, then your ATV will be nearly unusable. Gathering Signals is so time consuming with out cool down upgrades, and nearly impossible to do, and the rate the coordinate towers breakdown is way to punishing with buying fuses nearly being impossible due to the high cost. Server Upgrades are alot more slower to do, but cheaper cost wise, but pair'd with the floppy disc failing and writing limit, it becomes quite a punishing experience.

Playing the game as standard (collecting signals, drives, and hash codes) feels borderline unsustainable. With the requirement being 5 drives on average on any level, with the time consuming hash codes makes the process of getting daily tasks alot more taxing, and the reward for doing the daily tasks is very minor, not even 150 most days.  

The best way to experience 0.9 is to make a sugarcane farm and sell paper scraps, money duping with the mail box, or carry over things like bit coin miners and etc from older 0.8 saves. 

While most people that are complaining are way over reacting, there is one thing that is true.

The base game feels way to challenging and way to rough, and playing the "base" part of it feels impossible. There needs to be a cap put on most the features like the fuse breakings, fixing coordinate towers, and drive requirement count, while there needs to be flat out buffs on things like actual payout and floppy discs. 

Im so glad we got so many new things, and so many improvements, and im glad this is such an early drop of the 0.9 update that these issues can be fixed before the real 0.9 drop.

Upgrades being crazy expensive is  a good thing though.

You're going to make enough money to buy them all eventually...and then where do you go with it? Better to keep that goal set so high you're able to keep chasing it for longer and have more time to enjoy the game before it feels like you've peaked.

I do agree that basic maintenance needs more ways to substitute time with money so you can keep everything working by just investing more work into them rather than the solution being expensive  replacements, but The current build isn't as bad as it's felt to everyone who's played the previous versions. A lot of our frustrations are more in not understanding the new way things work (Like misusing the ATV battery as you said) and just not adapting yet.

I sank 400 points into an orange kerfur early thinking I'd need him for server maintenance  once everything started falling apart on me and fixing the dishes was too many balls to juggle, now I realize that's barely an issue now and I could have used that 400 on other things I needed.