I think the higher difficulty of time management and tower defense part made SP have a lot less "wriggle room" pushing most players into selecting similar perks. My method of dealing with this was to prolong length of day from 60 to 90 minutes (I would have chosen 80 minutes if I had that choice in the menue) without changing difficulty. I don't think most players will change their play style greatly no matter how the game is done, we have our preferences.That is a great summary of what I have experienced as well. I am assuming that most of this is coming from a Single Player perspective because that's how I normally play and this description is almost to a "T".
They will argue until they are they blue that the new system offers more variety. I suppose you could force yourself to take some kind of different route with the perks, but you tend to stick with what you know works for you. Supposedly for A18, this could change with more advanced perk trees and specializations... but I am worried about it. As a single player, in order to survive reasonably, you need to have a nice balance of everything. The new setup has the potential to force a SP to specialize when they really need to be a jack of all trades. I guess we'll see how it goes. Another possible outcome of what is to come is that a single player still ends up choosing the same perk path because again, we tend to go with what works for us. I think what we really need are circumstances that can happen in the world that affects our decisions more, and could force us into going a certain path we wouldn't normally go.
For the first horde night taking over a brick building is IMHO the best option. I also had success with simply using and shaping a big stone and building a court yard with lots of spikes and only one entrance to it.
I find building the horde night base a lot more interesting than in previous alphas. If you are a purist who thinks even having a funnel/single entrance to lead the zombies is an exploit then yes, you won't have fun with A17. I never built those artifical looking single file labyrinths on stilts, something you see posted quite often as exploity bases. I use principles that builders of antique castles used in the middle ages and they do work.