Water needed balance, it was tied to empty jars and unlimited harvesting. It's a main resource in the game and it shouldn't be something convenient to stockpile. Other resources have gear/skills that increase yields and stamina efficiency. Water is a resource for thirst and crafting, it's just as important as any other resource. Walking up to a river filling massive amounts of jars was bogus and had no nuances. Trying to balance around the accumulation of jars, or making a bunch of restrictions/changes to justify it would be worse than the solution we got. Water has more value, and it has at least SOME game nuance with dew collectors/mods/heat.
The clothes were not better. Most of them were inferior choices which gave them almost no value. The appearances had clipping issues and a lot of it looked goofy. People complain that there's only cloth scrap in loot now, when 99% of clothing drops were only worth scrap, especially if you already found a set of BDU. All they did was remove a redundant step of scrapping each piece. There was what, 3 main jackets you could wear that always went over your other clothes? Gothic pants looked cool. Every character i made always ended up looking the same, maybe except for dyes. Now there's a slot for head, upper body, lower body and boots. Each slot has a dozen distinctly different looks, and they can all be mismatched. There's way more combinations for appearances than there used to be, DISTINCT appearances and not looking like a hobo that escaped the circus. There's nothing wrong with the armors having magic stats in a video game, get over it.
The collectors we have now don't make water scarcer or harder to obtain. I remember when I started playing 1.0, I had a farm of collectors on the roof of a building. I could agree with your argument that water is linked to other recipes and it shouldn't be easy to have unlimited amounts, but there's always another limiting factor. For example, do you want to make explosive bolts? Well, water wasn't a problem for glue, but you still need gunpowder. Do you want yuca juice? Well, you need to grow it and wait to harvest it, Anyway, I don't think the current system is bad, it's just that the previous one worked perfectly well and didn't need anything else.
Clothing
The clothes looked bad because the models were old. If they had continued to update the clothes, they would look much better with the current graphics. Regarding what you said about most of the clothes being junk to be scrapped because you already have better clothes, well, I think you've already been given a good argument. It's the same as all the other inferior items you find. If TFP had continued updating and adding more clothes, it would be better and there would be more variety than there is now. Regarding magical armor, I'm not the only one who doesn't like having magical properties because in many cases it ruins the experience and the difficulty. It's a matter of taste. For me, armor is just that, a shield that protects you from harm and perhaps from the temperature. It's not that the clothes are worse. The only good thing I get out of the armor is that some of it looks really good, that's all.
The gore blocks was a neat idea, but it was janky as hell. Immersive is a funny word to use. Killing a bunch of zombies and watching them turn into a weird diamond of meat was jarring and silly. I get what they were going for, but not every idea can make the cut. Looting zombie corpses isn't related. It's not my opinion that it's monotonous. Time is important in 7Days, and the devs clearly don't want players to be wasting tons of time doing busywork nonsense. Spending several minutes looting dozens of bodies for pittance isn't worth the squeeze. Loot bags are very video-gamey, but i love them and it's always fun to see them appear. It makes killing zombies more rewarding.
gore blocks
I'm referring to the gore blocks from alpha 15 16, in the form of bodies, not the old ones. And yes, immersion is important in this type of game, otherwise why not confetti come out of zombies instead of blood? It's funny that looting corpses is a pointless waste of time, but looting 40 dew collectors isn't, and mining for 20 or 30 minutes to get a ridiculous amount of material isn't either, right? Crafting a weapon and having to wait 15 minutes isn't? It's practically the same as with loot bags. But more fake and less immersive.
"Then you can argue about tastes, but there are things that were better than now." I can't agree with you at all here. I saw the older systems as stepping stones, primitive, rough drafts, some were placeholders and store assets. I genuinely don't believe there are any old systems that are objectively better than the new ones, and i've yet to see any convincing arguments anywhere.
Well, that's your opinion, and I respect it, but I don't share it.
An example of a better system than the current one is plant cultivation. It's much more simplified now. Before, you could prepare the soil, fertilize it, and it turned out much better than it does now. You could simply plant seeds around the world, just for decoration. Now you have to put in a block that looks artificial and doesn't look good in the terrain. You can't plant seeds around the world without these blocks. There are other examples, such as weapon parts or the 600 quality levels, level degradation, etc. Now it's more simplified, but in many cases, simplifying doesn't make it better, not at all.