No they are not, they "lost the plot", and seeing comments like yours and the other above confirms me that you should never post in the forum or dev should never listen to you.
Changing core game systems at every release only shows how lost they are. In a dev cycle changing so much only makes the code messier and messier to a point there is no more control and everything crumbles into a messy code/game. Of course sometimes you have to change things even drastically if they dont work, but why wasting time into creating an annoying as hell drone, instead of adding a randomizer for zombies types.
And on another side, please dev decide if you want to go for a ton crap of stupid zombies with some "special" zombie mixed in, or if u want to go for less but harder ones.
As i said pipe weaps could have been a nice addition for early stage if handled correctly, and that is not the case.
New farming is so bad that is even a pain talking about it, should be reverted back to A19 and kept like that.
The new drone adds absolutely nothing.
The new loot system and RNG is terrible like finding the same item or recipe over and over, and not getting what you should need. Not even at the traders.
On the positive side, vehicles addons are good, and the new building blocks is good.
We need to see fixed the structural integrity as it's quite bugged for what i tested atm.
So as i said multiple times, the few good things of this new release are just destroyed by the bad additions.
P.S.
1 In addition dev should fix the fact that a bone knife level 4 is better than an hunting knife level 2.
A level higer tier weapon should be better that an level 6 inferior tier weap. The only difference should be boosted by installed mods.
2 The repair kit should be ereased and weapons / armors should need "parts" for fixing and beeing repaired. 1 forged iron and 1 duct tape and u can fix an entire car or machingun ... that is BS u should need parts for doing that. And repair kit maybe for minor fixes .... i'd like to see something like that in game. And maybe the ability to craft such parts. Not only to get them from "scrapping".
You do understand that the people who do drones, weapons, RWG, loot balancing, and all the other stuff are all different people right? The gun team certainly isn't balancing loot, and the art team certainly isn't going to handle the balancing and damage of pipe weapons.
Based on you saying the devs haven't taken it in the right direction, you must not have been here during A18 back when we didn't have food/water bars, our food WAS the stamina bar. So yes, they are certainly getting their act together on making the game work.
You also understand they added a 50% of an extra seed with LotL 2 correct? You bought a game in early access and here you are complaining about it. Having concerns and voicing them is one thing, but going out of your way to make such statenents that "THIS GAME NEEDS TO WORK MY WAY" and not doing anything to mod or make it your way is just annoying.
And they did add a new zombie type, have you been to the wasteland biome yet? As for your pipe weapon argument, stop being so @%$#ty with them. The rifle is for hunting, the shotgun is for close-range "im in trouble", the machine gun is good for groups, and the pipe pistol is good all around. Get better with them and use them accordingly. They're made of pipes dude, these aren't end-game weapons.
As for the code, what makes you think it gets "messier and messier" you obviously have no idea of what you're talking about. You do understand they DELETE unused code (bloat), stuff that doesn't need to be there, and work on optimizations right?
Go back to A15 and compare it to now, they've done a great job despite having some poor choices along the way which got changed. It's early access, they're testing, balancing, adding, and changing everything. That's how it works.