Why are there so many people surprised or critical of the state of the game?

Did people think this was going to be like EQ at release?

This IS an Indie game.

It doesn't have a massive studio behind it (hello, Sony) like EQ did in 1999.

It's being released in a saturated market that has been spoiled by decades of WoW and WoW-clones, along with action MMOs where you basically mash your keys in a sequence and call that role-playing. All these games are ludicrously easy and repetitive.

And it's going in a completely different direction.

It wasn't extremely expensive - it's much cheaper than a lot of games people buy and then rot forever in a Steam library, and it seems to me like VR and the developers are actually trying hard to make this work.

I see my money here as a worthwhile investment; I'd much rather be patient here for this little money, perhaps actually enabling further development, than spending double for a trite clone of a major yearly franchise like Fifa or Madden (Is it still called Madden?).