Yeah, I feel like pretty much everything touching combat is in some way underbaked at best and frustrating in a boring way at worst...
Temporal storms are unbearable; the spawn system makes even your home unsafe, incentivizing you to just dig a 2x1 hole to AFK in for several minutes (until you turn them off)
Temporal rifts and regional stability broadly don't really add anything (until you turn them off)
Death returns you to world spawn, for some ungodly reason (until you install a bed spawn mod)
Items despawn in minutes (until you install a corpse mod, or get uncomfortably comfortable with /tpwp You Died Here)
Not a single animal or hostile construct enemy so much as makes footstep sounds
Hunting is barely worth the time, for how impossible it is to actually track a hurt animal (until you install a blood trail and/or footprint mod). They can continue to outrun you forever, with no limits to their stamina and no way to really track them if you lose sight of them for even a moment
Attacking things in melee feels both clunky and impactless at the same time
Places like the Archive require light but don't let you build or place torches, negating any use for shields, so the odd sawblade locust just kinda kills you in two hits regardless of armor
I have not yet made it all the way through the Archives, but I've heard of the boss fight down there, and not a single thing I've heard about it has been positive
Non-animal enemies are straight up almost never worth fighting, not least since they almost never so much as drop anything
I was really surprised how much emphasis the game places on combat, considering how terrible of a state it's currently in. And I was surprised about how terrible of a state it's in, considering how well everything else works... except gears and stuff, I guess.
Even if you turn off temporal rifts and storms and the like, if you want to engage with the story content, you have to engage with the combat. And the combat is not in a good state at all.
Are there any announced plans of changing any of that anytime soon...?