I think you're right there.
Using myself as an example, I first heard about it from one of my daughter's friends when he recommended it. I picked up a copy when it was on sale and so did my wife and a friend of ours (and her son), and we've been playing three or four player games since then.
But that was A15.
Like many (probably the majority) of players, I never saw the earlier versions. I wasn't around when the devs were announcing the game or running the Kickstarter, so their intents for the finished game weren't known to me. As far as I knew A15 was (other than bugfixes) the finished game as it was intended. And I bought and played the game based on liking what I saw in A15
So for people like me, whatever changes the devs make to the game aren't seen as bringing it closer to the intended game. They're seen as taking it further away from the game I bought. That's not to say they're necessarily bad - I've liked all the changes from A15 to A16, for example - but that's the problem (and it's my problem, not the dev's problem) with early access games. People who come in during early access see the game as it is, rather than seeing the big picture.
For many of us who live outside America and are therefore less exposed to "gun culture", the gun details are completely irrelevant. They could just be "generic pistol" and "generic shotgun" and the like and be completely unrealistic and we'd never know the difference.
(Actually, that brings up an interesting point - it seems that the game, like a lot of games, includes real-world guns. Don't you run into copyright and trademark issues if you reproduce real-world gun designs and names? Do you have to pay gun manufacturers for permission to use their products? I'd hate to think that the money I spend on games was funding the arms industry and gun manufacturers...)