Somi had a great play test, it's certainly a different game and there were certainly parts of my build I am changing for our next test, but there is not a single thing I would change back to the way we did things in 1.3.
Playing a celestial spellsword was immensely satisfying, I enjoyed playing a low damage, high crowd control/resistance spear and board fighter. I enjoyed feeling like I could make a difference in a fight with weakness, destruction, stun, and intercept without my role being a stick jockey or a caster. My one suggestion would be to make there be a reason to take and cast signature spells, but I've posted that elsewhere.
I strongly disagree that the monsters were a straight port of the 1.3 monsters, there appeared to be a lot of care in making the FEELING of a monster type fit in to all the new rules and changes. as someone made an example above, intercepts from lackeys, fear from big vampires, various strikes from the monsters that made it obvious of exactly what the thing was. sure, the effort of the NPCs doing the flavor cant be understated, but bears and wolves are vastly different to fight, but fairly similar to rep.
I'm looking forward to our second playtest in order to see what was "new rules funk" and what was mechanically clunky (retribution stuck out to me as feeling odd in the moment only to remember that it was pretty common in practice). I am shifting a fair amount of XP away from blacksmithing investment, as while having 30 sec refits was great, there just wasnt enough to do with production to justify the spent XP not going to more fast refits instead (maybe have more consumables than arrows/bolts? or more rituals using the strengthening charge?).
All in all, the rules changes have done something more valuable for an immersive game than any single thing could, it gave a variety to character creation that has been missing for far too long. If I walk into a LARP tavern, and there are 4 identical fighters, 4 identical casters, 1 bow rogue and one sword rogue with the same skills, then that feels like a game. If I walk into the tavern and see a multitude of interesting things, character concepts, finally having a reason for craftsman, etc., then it feels like a fantasy tavern. you dont know if the weak guy is weak because he could drown you in status effects for then next 10 minutes, and you don't have everyone and there mother piled high with pocket magic.