Major Issues

[BmB]

It has taken a year to release the first substantial update, this is obviously not okay. If it takes a year for each item on the roadmap it might literally not be done by the year 2030. But the update is pretty good, the tech tree is well designed, the missions are fun enough, and it's good to have some sensible structure to the gameplay for the first time since 2013.

However the game is just too buggy, it has been buggy for a year with little to no sign of improvement, urgency, or caring. So I'll make a list of the biggest gripes I have right now which is keeping the game from being fun or playable.

1. The parachutes, why do they not deploy? I had to do a descent 5 times just now simply to get the parachutes to deploy.
2. The stages, why do they not respond? I often press space and nothing happens. I had a stage of sepratrons which I was going to use in case of parachute failure, of course you have to fire them at just the right moment, and if the stage does not go off, then you can imagine what happens. Even a backup using a totally different game system is non-functional. This most critical mechanic being unresponsive and unpredictable makes the game simply awful to play. Staging needs to happen consistently and immediately, without any uncertainty or doubt.
3. The VAB, after using it for some time it will just start to bug out, maybe you can recover it by reloading or maybe you'll have to start a whole new campaign (which with this update just became unacceptable.) you just don't know. You can sometimes not rearrange or edit stages, you can sometimes not move parts, you can sometimes not set the launch assembly.
4. The delta-v calculator is all over the place, it's nice to have a built in dV reference, but it is totally useless if you cannot see what your dV actually is. Sometimes it is stuck at 0 and will not update until you rebuild the entire rocket. The stage dV disagrees with the assembly dV, which is correct? Sometimes removing and adding the same part in the same place will give different dV readings, at that point not having it would be less confusing.
5. The save system, just why? I don't understand the point of having a different name for the "workspace" and the craft, that is just confusing, as far as I can tell they should always be the same name. And your list gets polluted with random autosaves that delete the description. There was nothing wrong with how saving craft worked in KSP1.
6. Building a rocket and pressing "launch" DOES NOT SAVE THE ROCKET. If you do not remember to manually save before launching, YOUR BUILD IS DELETED. What the actual love? In KSP1 you would always get your last build back whenever you went into the VAB unless you specifically pressed "load" or "new". This is just a blatant disregard for the users critical data. If you're lucky an autosave might have happened in the last 10 minutes but it does not save the final state of the craft, so good luck with that.
7. Why is there no interstage fairing? You can't make apollo.
8. Switching the launch assembly loves up your staging, each assembly should really have it's own set of stages. Autostaging in general is terrible. In KSP1 pressing the reset button you could generally expect a reasonable result as long as you weren't being too clever in your build. Here you HAVE to adjust staging every time you make a change because the default staging is so bad and obviously wrong, main engines at the bottom of the rocket will appear at the top of the staging list, endless empty stages get created. All in all building is a horrible nightmare due to all these issues.
9. The "landed" bug after taking off with a lander and being unable to see your trajectory in the map has been there from the start.
10. Between the light bug where you can't turn on lights and the lack of helmet lamps on kerbals means night time or even landing in a crater in shadow is a no-go.
11. Everything being "default-name-2734" and having the capsule icon means I have no idea what anything is. As soon as you detach or dock something like a lander it loses its name, and everything has the same icon. It's easy to get lost. Again this was not a problem in KSP1, with auto-naming and icons being mostly sensible and only rarely you had to manually fix it. You can't even change the icon in KSP2.

I can only describe this as a state that makes you feel that"nothing works". I fear I'll have to wait another year or more for things to improve. And releasing a major early access update just before the holidays knowing full well it may have issues is such a genius move, making any kind of rapid response to a buggy update impossible.

[Kerbart]

And that's a concise list.

What troubles me is that Intercept "explains" the 10 month period by saying they had to prioritize bug fixing. But we expect the other roadmap updates to be rolled out much quicker. My biggest fear remains that they consider the bugs fixed and that the game will remain in its current condition for the remainder of its life with an occasional annoyance being addressed. I might be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.  But so far, the pace in bug fixing has been atrociously  slow. That seems to have been due to priority given to For Science. With the promised acceleration of milestones it only seems more priority is given to the milestones. Obviously, bug fixing will then be relegated to a lower rung on the ladder.

The game now has some goals, providing more focused play. And it's better. The numbers, and thrilled reaction on the forum show that.

But: it's better, not good. Far from good. The only reason it's so much better than before is because it came from a really, really bad and dark place. I hope Intercept will recharge their batteries over the holidays and get to work in the new year understanding that.

[Periple]

That’s not really how game development works. Getting less bugs isn’t just about prioritizing bug fixing, it’s about fixing the processes and practices that led to having so many bugs in the first place. Doing that while developing new content in parallel makes it harder.

Version 0.2.0 is good evidence that they’ve done this. If they hadn’t, there would be a lot more regression because they wouldn’t have been able to cleanly merge the fixes from the 0.1 branch.

All these fundamental improvements are now in place. It also must have been a really painful year for them. I’m sure that the team is super determined not to get in the same situation again.

We’ll see what the pace of development will be, but I’m confident we won’t see the kinds of bugfests and performance problems that plagued the game until 0.1.5. There will be some regression and occasional game-breakers but I think the overall trajectory will be in the right direction!

[The Aziz]

7 hours ago, BmB said:

It has taken a year to release the first substantial update

Just short of 10 months*

7 hours ago, BmB said:

If it takes a year for each item on the roadmap

It won't, partially because there's less than 7 items on the roadmap left, and mostly because now that they've got the basics sort of going in the right direction and the game is somewhat stable (more than it was on day 1) the periods between feature updates should be shorter, because they won't have to spend ¾ of their time of making sure the game actually works.

7 hours ago, BmB said:

it has been buggy for a year with little to no sign of improvement, urgency, or caring.

Nearly 950 bugs fixed over 6 versions is no sign of improvement to you? Few hotfixes applied shortly after some crucial elements were broken is no urgency to you? Devs actually reading, sometimes responding to people's bug reports, and fixing them as they go along is no caring to you?

7 hours ago, BmB said:

The save system, just why? I don't understand the point of having a different name for the "workspace" and the craft, that is just confusing, as far as I can tell they should always be the same name. And your list gets polluted with random autosaves that delete the description. There was nothing wrong with how saving craft worked in KSP1.

Because you can have multiple differently named craft in your workspace. Example: you create one workspace called "Aircraft" and you can hold all your aircraft there, each with different name. Or, a workspace called "Lifters" and have a family of lifters to which you attach your payloads without having to reload each thing separately.

7 hours ago, BmB said:

Why is there no interstage fairing? You can't make apollo.

You can. It just won't connect to the upper stage, but with wobbles largely fixed, that's not really a problem.

Most of the things you listed are known, and largely fresh bugs (didn't see you reporting them anywhere, the more info the devs get, the better).

7 hours ago, BmB said:

I can only describe this as a state that makes you feel that"nothing works".

Weirdly, for me it's "it mostly works" The things that don't, can be often solved by rebooting the game.

7 hours ago, BmB said:

I fear I'll have to wait another year or more for things to improve.

Why with the year again? We got 8 small bugfix+hotfix+content updates before For Science arrived. Huge issues have been resolved, the performance pretty much doubled since 0.1.0. The team has already said they're planning additional patches between milestone updates, just like it has been in the last 10 months.

If you want to put it away, sure. In the meantime, I'm having a blast.

7 hours ago, Kerbart said:

What troubles me is that Intercept "explains" the 10 month period by saying they had to prioritize bug fixing. But we expect the other roadmap updates to be rolled out much quicker.

They had a choice. Pushing for content updates while the game was barely working, or ensuring the game mostly works before dropping content updates. Which one would you like to play? 

Currently, the most known bugs are either some older things that already received some improvements (orbital decay, wobbles, terrain issues, trajectories etc) or new stuff from 0.1.5 and 0.2. If there's something older, it usually is way down the severity (and as a result, priority) list and may get resolved in the future - once the most crucial items are dealt with.

Hell, even with my own experience, most of the bugs I encounter are minor, if there's something bigger, I usually see it already reported.