I agree with you Jax!
I mean - sure I do know that the AI will get dumber/dumbed down and all the 'tweaks' to come to 'fix this' 'improve that' but ultimately "we" play just to play together. At times we used to build massive bases, but now we really can't do anything like that because of the AI and zeds come and find you wherever you are... Many of us miss the just going down to dig because it was kind of cathartic, or a couple of the others also miss farming because that too was cathartic... That too is apparently why we might have to go without at least one player, possibly two.
Then there's the generic "just turn the zombies off" or "just play in creative mode" or "just mod it out" responses but with at least A16.4 you didn't need to do that. Someone could just go down to their 'diggie-diggie hole' and dig to their hearts content. I mean my wife and another player within our group at A15 or so dug, dug and dug, and dug... For 3 sessions (1 session = one night maybe +3 hours if not more)!!! That was an entire months play since we play together as a group once a week! An entire month of them digging, us making fun of them, etc LOL... All of that is gone now. 2 like the way it currently is because all they ever did is kill zeds... Nothing else... But now there's more of a need to really play together, much more so than before - and some of us 'hard workers' are tired of having to harvest resources etc and want to go out and kill too... As a result that's fracturing the group... Oh well, we still got many other games to play.