To me, it's not so much that duct tape is more valuable than steel, but that I have so much steel because there's nothing to do with it because the game won't let you do anything fun until much, much later in the game now. You can have all the duct tape you want, sure it's a bit more of a hassle than it used to be, but you get quite a bit of murky water looting, and the dew collectors, once set up, crank out water without any further resources or intervention. If you cared to, you could set up a field of dew collectors very early on and just collect a ton of water once a day in a matter of seconds. If you collect all the bones you come across rather than throwing them on the ground like before, you could fill a swimming pool with glue before the first horde night.
I think it's weird to change a fundamental mechanic of the game so drastically, seemingly to make water management more critical, yet the end result actually makes water management so trivial that it quickly becomes irrelevant. You will have more than enough money to buy every water filter you come across simply because there is nothing else to spend it on. I really don't see the point to their water changes, but it doesn't really bother me because water is actually easier now than before.
I was really excited about U21, and initially I felt like they made a lot of great changes, which in all fairness they did, but ultimately I'm just about done with U21 already because you just aren't allowed to have fun anymore. It's super boring now slowly building up your weapon crafting book by book so you can craft a tier 2 and then a tier 3, and maybe tomorrow a tier 4. You're not going to loot anything fun, nor are you going to buy anything fun from the vendor, just book by book you get to slowly make an ever so slightly better weapon than you're carrying.