Choose a game, any game and you will find people exploiting it to the max. Starts with simple one way smokes in Cs-Go, goes over shooting zombies in the foot in Scum to get more famepoints and wallpieces that get illegaly stacked in Conan Exiles. Just name a game and search the internet.
In my opinion, a game should give you freedom and choises and a little bit of challenge. Thats why we play it. It should help you to relax after a long day of work. It should excite your creativity and it should give you things to do without feeling boring oder stressed out. In the end its up to each player how he wants to play a game. If someone likes to sit in their cave and spamcraft 100 axes then be it. Another one will only craft one and play totally different. One likes to explore, the next likes to build and the third wants to unlock all kind of blueprints or sell all his goodies to the trader.
I understand that the devs have a vision for their game. It would be bad if they have not. But in my opion its important to understand that a good game is not messurd on grafics, best fps or theme, its messured on the freedom you get as a player. Best example is Minecraft. Simple Pixelgame but sold to millions of people that played it fanaticly, in europe even officially in schools.
I personally liked A16.4 more. Because I felt it gave me more freedom. I like my zombies dumb and slow, I like to have endless building and defense options. I don´t like been pushed to use only one type of spikes or that I have to build my base a certain way only to get the hord done without loosing 80% of my base. I know people see it differently, but thats why we are here in the end. To discuss and show all kinds of playstyle.
The rest ist up to the devs.
I get pretty bored in a17 vanilla myself, by day 8-12 I am almost level 60 or 70 usually on 100% exp, can make anything better than I could ever hope to find, and just surviving in the world is boring when food and water is a non issue before day 1 is even done. Killing zombies is boring because its the same carbon copy zombies all with the same exact stats, any makle normal zombie has 150 hp, any normal female has 125 hp no matter which it is, then you have fatties, which are 200 female, 250 male, and 300 for the tourist one. Upping difficulty doesn't increase zombie hp, it bascally gives them a percentage of damage reduction, and a increase in their damage output. Its why I won't play on insane or above warrior, the zombies just become far to tanky that it starts to be a chore to have to deal with them. I'd rather warrior up their damage by 50% as it currently does, but leaves their damage resistances at nomad levels. Zombies should do a fair amount of player damage, but should be easy to kill.
In many zombies movies the people usually get killed either because they do something stupid, don't watch what they are doing/where they are going, or there is just a huge horde of zombies they cannot dodge. I mean, I watched some of the walking dead and seen so many people die in the dumbest ways in that tv series that I just shook my head.
I find a17 boring as every game I play is basically the exact same, always get the same perks around the same levels etc. A18 is going to fix some of those issues, as you can now get most/all perks from books, so it'll be different every time, as you never know what rngesus will bless you with. Could have a game where you somehow find all miner 69'er books on day 1 by some fluke, Making you a block destroying god on day 1. Could fidn the workbench/chem station book on day 1, make those on day 1, and be able to craft quite a few things way earlier than you could in a17, it'll just add the randomness back to progression that a16 kinda had, and a17 completly lacks.
My main issue personally with the games dev so far is how wishy washy they seem to be, How many skill/perk redo's has this been now? They need to settle on something finally and go from there and build on it. That is their main issue thats holding the game back. They just seem to lack direction. Most games have stuff like what is being changed to be in a18 done in the first alpha, they then stick with it, build on it, improve it, but don't overhaul the entire system every new alpha version. The other issue I feel the game has is unity, I keep hearing about how they can't do this and that due to some limitation unity has. Unity IS a good engine, just not the best engine I think for something like 7 days to die. Especally if you want modability as unity depends on archive files, and I am unsure if it can use loose files like fallout/elder scrolls can to override the files in the archives. Modding won't super take off till this is possible. the xpath system is a good start, but we need something like the xpath system for graphics/models/textures/animations etc.