Steam at the moment says "7128" hours. Thus i assume to be able to answer in the sense of an answer to the thread starter instead of dully complaining.
Disclaimer: I entered only at the end of alpha 13 / beginning of alpha 14, thus have limited knowledge and no feeling about the phases before.
7DTD had a bunch of concepts tried in the last years which were happily accepted by the community of players. You can still literally see it on the vast amount of videos on youtube. You can even proof - on the basis of comments to those videos - that the vast majority of players that did not produce videos by themselves liked those concepts.
But the Funpimps ditched them in their seaming strife for a game that frustrates the players to a maximum.
Lets list at least a few of them...
1. The concept of "learning by doing": Introduced around the time when i entered the game (thus either with A13 or with A14), every single youtuber (of those i watched) was positively exited. Of course, with "learning by doing", a player CAN potentially - if he so wishes - spam-learn. With passing time, many youtubers went to do that. Like many Gamers that played some Elder Scrolls Game. The Elder Scrolls used the same concept long before, and players loved to spam-learn certain things. Me included at that time - ash on my head! After going to play that style of spam-doing, SOME (by no means ALL) players began to criticize that concept - MOSTLY exactly those players who castigated themselves with that. Instead of lending a helping psychologic hand to those minority of pitiable gamers, the funpimps ditched the concept alianating the vast majority of players who loved it. For me, i simply watched the youtuber "Gerugon" - who was the one who fascinated me for this game - and ditched that spam-doing ones and for all, because playing for fun as it goes along has simply much more value than castinating oneself.
2. The concept of gardening with hoe and fertilizer: I never saw a single guy complaining anything about that one. It was fun, you could "cultivate" the surroundings of manors with flowerbeds and it was fun designing and building them and watching the results after a few weeks of extensions. The funpimps ditched it anyways with about A17.
3. The concept of having a huge amount of building blocks to chose from: Over the last versions, beginning with A16, the funpimps reduced the available blocks groupwise one by one. They introduced an OTHER concept that is in fact a very comfortable one - that building blocks get generic source blocks -, and they introduced a few new block shapes, but at the same time they screwed the classic block variants to a pitiable mess in comparison to what was available in A15. See on youtube and compare it to ingame A19 for yourself!
4. The concept of simple surrounding hitboxes for pixelwise complex blocks: With A17, the funpimps heavily changed the hitbox calculation for most - at least for the most crucially used - blocks (as well as for the interaction with entities), so that they TRIED (but pitifully missed) to make the cursor hit a block exactly when it hits an existing pixel of said block. They missed it because somehow they totally screwed the math behind it. Thus, nowadays, for example, if you would try to hit the massive metal strips of a metal spike trap, you would have to painstakingly find a few pixels pointing to the earth (!) behind (!) the trap to actually hit the trap. And vis versa: You need to find some pixels on the metal stripes in the picture to actually repair the earth beneath it. The same goes with all and every plant. And with plants, the hitboxes somehow get overlapped by hitboxes of blocks that are completely out of view. When places beside a plant, plates, for example, seem to count as full blocks hitbox wise. The same was going with gigantic boulders in A17. Fortunately, the funpimps did something to mitigate that last obstacle. You nowadays, in A19, are able to hit a boulder somewhat all over his multiblock body. But with all other blocks, including plants and traps, it is still a bloody mess. WHY, by the heavens, did the funpimps see the need of exchanging SIMPLY shaped surrounding hitboxes - which functioned all the time up to A16 and NOBODY ever complaining about them - for pixelwise such? WHY?!? If they at least did it correctly... But no, they screwed it all along. That whole thing gets an iceberg under the tip: In each session, after some time, the hitboxes not only for complex shaped blocks, but for each and every block get DISPLACED - by a few centimeters or so, so that hitting anything anywhere becomes a game of dice. The funpimps in fact did that whole thing decades better in previous alphas - up to A16. Then they let some apprentice lay their fingers on the hitbox calculation.
If you are REALLY determined to let things have pixelated hitboxes, at least make the math behind it correct! Otherwise, i'm absolutely sure nobody would complain having a simplified hitbox that reserves some room for a line of sight to the block behind, but offers safe and certain hit when aimed SOMEWHERE AROUND the center - NOT with subpixel accuracy and NOT with displacements dependend on daytime and weather and moon phase. And dice.
5. The concept of simple surrounding hitboxes for entities and weapon swings: EVERY game i played in my live did that one correct. At least, I played no game that did it just remotely so screwed as the funpimps managed do bake it in A17. Fortunately, beginning with A18, the funpimps returned, step by step, to a more playable system. Guys: Even first person shooters with drastically more complex weapons and moves get this right. 7DTD was - for some time - the one outstanding exception where arrows did have hitboxes of 1 square meters, but sledgehamers and enemies such of 1 square MILLImeters. Luckily halfways gone with A19. If you simply returned to the absolutely accepted and functioning concept you had in place up to A16, no one would complain.
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Beside those criticisms, the funpimps are introducing a few nice and well accepted concepts over time. Lets have a look at those:
1. More variants in enemies: Since the zombies are one half of the defining matter of the game, those variations are always well accepted.
2. More variants in vehicles: The motorbike and the truck are something that introduces a touch of car racing games into 7DTD. Then: Why the hell are those things so sluggy in the vanilla settings? As soon as you even slightly (by factor 1.4) enhance the speed of the vehicles, the rides become really (!) FUN. Pimps! Hmmm?!?
3. More variants in self made decorative blocks. Just: Could you, please, quit scrapping hundreds of old ones at the same time? Old ones that were FUN? Pimps?
4. More variants in POIs. With the current state in A19, i have the impression to never get the whole picture of what is where in the vast amount of different POIs. Despite playing this game excessively. The average player will never ever get the chance to get even a glimps into all the ideas the funpimps invested into the design of the POIs. Nearly all PIOIs have settings with an underlying telltale, which you mostly will only realize after you go through the whole thing repeatedly. So, for example, the story around Grace: I still bicker with myself what the true cohesion is behind the scenes: Did the swine become intelligent? By being fed with the supercorn? Did it, in the end, kill and partially eat the whole stuff of men working at the facility, after those men first used the supercorn to mass produce and slaughter piggies? In the lowest cellar level before the trap door to the lair of grace, it looks as if men where slaughtered instead of pigs, to produce even more of the supercorn with the fertilizer made of the dead bodies...
Well: The funpimps do not need to offer written proof of those stories: They speak for themselves. and Players can make them up for themselves as they thing fit. And nearly EVERY POI has something to offer in that regard. THAT is one of the really shining gemstones, the funpimps build into this game. That so far makes up for the annoyances counted earlier.
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So, overall, in my opinion the game is still an outstanding gemstone. Especially by the COMBINATION of all the involved aspects: Castle building strategy ("tower defense"), Voxel based world modification with (!) sufficient realistic physics, First person shooting fights, Medieval touch regarding weapons and tools (but very modern in late game), Exploration and Looting and Quests and Role playing character development - You nowhere else get that bundle. Keep it that way!
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Just a last thought about the play time (>7000): Yes, from time to time, the game lingers in the background. But the >7000 hours result from the game being outstandingly attractive, just as some strategy games were beforehand. The game has an astonishingly high replay value. You don't know anything about the explorable space - in any of the involved aspects - after the first 100 hours. You will mostly get a glimps in merely one or two dozens of POIs, and in one single knappsack path in the perk jungle. When you played it ten times - at which point you will have gotten the greater picture of POI designs and possible solutions along the perks knappsack problem and how this combines with Looting and Quests, as well as a good view of the annoyances that can get into your way -, you will have invested around 1000 to 2000 hours. And then, possibly, this only triggers the desire to get it perfect. And then comes the next alpha with radically changed (and hopefully not so much screwed) mechanics and calculations. And then you start modding. And then - look over you shoulder - you have put some thousand hours into it.
