I think that the game's career mode should be fundamentally changed, for a few reasons, and the tech tree is just a part of the reason why. Right now we have a system that tries to wrap itself around key game mechanics in ways that are lost on most players. It is trivial for an inexperienced player to make so many mistakes as to make progression nigh impossible, and force them to have to restart. This isn't good. Even on easy the way things are set up makes the game challenging at the start (in arbitrary, non-fun ways) and become easier over time as you access better equipment. It strikes me as kind of silly to do things this way -- create all sorts of artificial barriers and road blocks at the beginning, and slowly take them away by giving the player access to the real parts later. It doesn't really make sense. Instead, it would be much better to have a very focused and "easy" starting experience, that grows into an expansive and open "hard" one. It should feel more like a campaign mode and less like a "experienced players only" challenge mode that just gets easier as you get more and better stuff. I understand that making mistakes has been a fundamental part of the game, but it isn't really fun for a new player to experience that in the arbitrarily hard restrictions of career mode. Most of us learned how to play before there even was such a thing, so making career mode "easy" seems like a bad thing to us. We have already developed all the fundamental skills to get things to orbit or to transfer to the mun and back, but we learned them when the game was just a open sandbox. Trying to learn them in the claustrophobic career mode environment is way less enjoyable, and is ultimately frustrating for new players. Career should be less about "lets try and make a space program under these arbitrarily difficult and constraining conditions" and much more about "lets learn about getting to space and back in one piece and go from there". The tech tree should be much less tree-like and much more linear. It makes 0 sense to separate 2.5m tanks and engines into separate nodes. They are essentially useless without one another (especially to a new player). Instead, I think career should start as a very linear system that focuses on having all the parts necessary for a specific set of missions. Once you satisfactorily complete those beginning missions (which guide you through the basics of spaceflight), you then unlock access to new missions, and new parts to go along with them. The missions/contracts -> funds -> science system "works" but isn't really very good in my mind. It doesn't make much sense in real life, either. I think a more focused and curated experience would be a lot better. Real life missions see years of development, often requiring designing and building very specific (and typically unique) parts that cater to the mission at hand. Forcing us to complete early missions with extremely limited resources (part count limits, contract count limits, weight limits, no patched conics or maneuver nodes, etc.) on top of trying to learn the game just isn't fun. I think they are fundamentally missing the boat here on what a good gameplay experience is, especially for a new player. The tech tree is just another part of the gameplay experience that really doesn't make sense to a new player, and feels like it is focused around creating specific challenges for experienced players instead. Of course kerbals would have inverted ladders before wings before rockets. The current state is not reflective of this, and doesn't make any sense.
