Thanks for playing the new version!
In short, most of the things you said are right. I'm either planning to do them, or add some variation of them. There are so many things I have to do that are all important to some degree that some of them are simply left unattended for way too long.
I saw some streams or videos of people playing the game. What seems to me like the biggest problem is the fact that people have no idea what to expect from this game, or what it actualy is. Most people see rpg maker and decide that this is just a ordinary linear rpg where you just walk around and kill everything, which this is deffinitely not true. Hints partialy fixed that. I saw someone playing the newest version and he played slightly differently than most people did when they tried the version without hints. I'm quite open to making the game begining easier and adding more hints and tutorials, but I don't want to make the game completely braindead with minimaps, arrows and popups showing up after every step. The systems I have right now seem adequate. I just have to expand them more.
The problem with Billy not being at the farm is quite easy to solve and I have no idea why I didn't do this earlier. The random npc locations get triggered the moment the game starts. I can simply force Billy to stay at his house for about two weeks so everyone can meet him there.
As for the beggining quests, this sounds like a good idea. Maybe he could just give the player a piece of paper with some basic goals, like get 60 food, 100 silver, make a friend and so on. Could give some early game goals and is easy to ignore for subsequent playthroughs. Or I can just do bunch of proper quests. Suong has one that makes the player walk around to teach them where everything is. Won't be too hard to add more of this kind of stuff.
As for directions, these are kinda already in the game. Usualy, when you see a word in green color, it means it is a topic you can talk with other NPCs about. Sadly, very few npcs actualy have any dialogue about these topics. You can read the note, get Riverstone topic, find the bridge guard, talk to him and he will tell you where that place is. I didn't add hint about that kind of dialoge in the game yet because of how inconsistent the dialogue is. For now, I added few more hints that tell the player about some important locations and I added some more signs to buildings, so people can tell which are important.
As for the main plot, it already works similiary to what you propose. It just isn't comunicated to the player enough so very few people even know it exists. You have to deliver a letter, but nobody knows where the guy is. Turns out only the leaders of the main factions know. You can't even enter their towns unless you have trade papers. You get trade papers by showing all the main NPCs in the starting area that you can actualy be useful. Getting these papers is how the main story ends for now, since it is not developed further yet. This pretty much serves as a extended tutorial. NPCs will give you the signature only if they like you, or if you do some simple quest related to their profession. None of this has anything to do with the actual plot, but moves you forward and should naturaly teach the player about all the skills, all the NPCs and that things usualy have more than one solution.
The confusion with new players is a big problem and I don't know exactly why. People IRL that played the game didn't really had any problems and could figure out where most things are quickly. Streamers on the other hand missed plenty of things in plain sight. One of them for example didn't notice the inn where all the NPCs were and he didn't notice the backpacks with items laying on the ground. Most likely has something to do with them wanting to cover as many of the AGDG games as posible so they are not really focusing and just rushing through things or,...
The resolution. Being locked to 640x480 sceen makes a lot of things barely visible on modern screens so they simply missed those things because they were too small. This might also be a problem, which I don't think I can fix. The engine is too old and slow. There are ways to increase the resolution, but all of them tanked the performance hard. On modern hardware no less. Having the simple fullscreen / window toggle is the best I can do without switching the engine completely. I will try to look around the net for some kind of solution, but the whole situation quite reminds me of the time when I tried to make Diablo 2 run at high resolution. it just made the screen show more of the map and kept the size of NPCs and everything else small.
As for the gramatical errors, There are LOADS of them. It is no secret that 99% of all dialogue in the game right now was writen on a spot without much thought put into it. I will be fixing some of these typos, but I want to focus on dialogue more once all other things are set in stone. I want to make dialogue more lively and I will have to add NPC animations for that to happen. Once I have these systems in place, I will write proper dialogue and do proper grammar checks. Think of the current dialogue and text as placeholder.
And as for the text getting cut short in some windows, I'm sure you are going to love the next version since I'm getting rid of all the vector fonts and I'm moving to bitmaps instead so no more installing fonts. It works alright, but I'm in the process of manualy adjusting pretty much every window in the entire game. Initial versions will have some badly displayed text and missing colors, but I think this is a necesary step. Installing fonts was very anoying for the majority of people and some even didn't know how to do it.
I will try to fix all of the smaller issues you found. The book is actualy one of the first items I added into the game and I completely forgot it existed. After some testing, the book appears in your inventory and must be "used" before it appears in your book library. I will change that also.
I really thank you for playing the game again and taking your time to write all that down. It really makes things easier for me and it also is good to know that people like what you do. Thanks.