Here is what happened. The devs put a bunch of time and effort into the perk system. It appears a large portion of the player base does not like the perk system among most things. The devs cannot realize this because they invested so much time into it. Sometimes you have got to cut something loose when you've messed up, despite how much time you've put into it. Instead it is "we know best, we know how you should have fun"
It boggles my mind that the devs don't know what this game is. It's marketed as a survival game. Lets be real however. The devs thought they were creating a survival game, but instead they created was one of the best ever tower defense, sandbox, building, creative games ever... ever. It appears they're too thick to realize, people don't put 1000s of hours into a "survival game" when "survival" is all but learnt after 20-40 hours of game play. They made the things we like doing purposefully long and obtuse and more difficult. They made the things we were indifferent to, a requirement and tedious to ad nauseam
What person ever watched a stream consistently to learn about survival after playing for 40 hours? We played and watched people building cool stuff. We watched because we didn't know how people were going to progress. Guess what, we know now how the game progress, because it is a formula.