I've played this game plenty, and I currently admin a server for a discord community. I've never complained or even commented on these discussions before, so I'm hardly a troll. The changes to food, shields and bows suck. It makes solo content much more tedious (not harder, just more tedious), and discourages people from playing on their own. At the same time, support for dedicated servers is minimal (we don't even have a sticky option under the join screen for previously joined servers).

Neuroperson has it right. This 'big update', which I have been looking forward to since they announced it, was so underwhelming and frankly disappointing that I'm starting to question the direction that the devs are taking the game. I played it for around 6 hours today with some friends (new world, as per suggestions) and only encountered stamina issues and deer meat. It doesn't feel like a big update, nor that they added anything substantial to the game, only 're-balanced' mechanics that seemed to be fine before. If that's what we see in the next handful of updates, I'll be tapping out.