I personally want to list everything I’ve lost as a player.
I won’t say these features were removed for no reason. But let’s be honest: the removals were most likely due to a shift in the game’s development direction and simplification of everything. The reason behind it could be anything: technical difficulties, optimization, a change in the developers' thinking, a desire to appeal to a broad audience or attempt of rushing the 1.0 release (so they no longer have to call the game an alpha and can meet the requirements to publish the game on consoles). Only TFP team members know the reason for sure, but I never saw them explaining the necessity of any of aforementioned removals.
- A lot of zombie variants, like farmers, miners, hunters, cheerleaders (and even these annoying football players).
- Wellness system, which encouraged players to avoid death more than anything we have today.
- LBD
- Blunderbuss
- Dense morning fogs, old biome ambience.
- Fields biome with wild corn and some cacti.
- Real farming, which required a hoe to till the soil.
- Visible casual clothing like t-shirts, coats, jackets, dusters, denim pants, and anything else a person could actually find and wear.
- Character customization with sliders for body and face parts.
- Crafted armor, like padded, leather and iron set without class-specific bonuses.
- And most importantly, Sexual T-Rex
Just a sidenote: If you exchange the seats of your car for ones with a different color, do you say you lost the seats or that you replaced the seats?
About 2/3 of the items on your list were replaced with something else. You didn't get to choose the "new color" though.
I am just mentioning this because this often cited critique of having lost features of the game sounds as if 7D2D shrank over the years, from a full-fledged game to a game for the smartphone market. It surely moved in the direction of more mass appeal, but it also increased (massively?) in features.
