I'm lvl 25 now, and I have some overall impressions of the new patch.
Builds & Difficulty. First, this time around you have things possible with one build which you don't have with another.
It's on Hard and Very Hard difficulty where your build choices start to matter and spreading out too much can make you relatively weak.
I'm playing a guns build, perks specializing in assault rifles, but using all kinds of power weapons. So for guns builds I think Hard is the difficulty for smoother gameplay and less often reloading of savegames. I plan to make another playthrough with a (female) netrunner/pistol ninja, and that's the build where I think Very Hard would be more appropriate, because you would get into intense gunfights with multiple enemies less often. So it would make sense to have individual enemies hit harder and have more longevity. But I find Very Hard too punishing for an assault guy, even with grenades and Sandevistan, if you get hit twice, and are caught without healing items, you are likely dead. Or maybe I'm not that good yet? But how do you get "good" - lots of save/load cycles obviously. I'm not interested in overcoming that learning curve..
As I've seen others point out, perk trees differ significantly in their utility. I've spent about 5 points in dash but I barely find myself using it. The very fact that you have to use a dedicated button for this action makes using this skill tougher than others.
Level scaling and balance. All the drama here over it was heavily overblown. Much as I imagined, blanket changes to enemy levels can't expunge the built-in difficulty grading of zones and enemies. Even with 2.0's "level scaling" Maelstromers of Northside felt a lot easier to kill than Animals in Pacifica. I did one gig for Mr. Hands in Pacifica - the one where you have to descend down a construction site's foundation into an Animals' hideout and steal a van from there. I had numerous skull enemies present and it was waay harder than the HeavenMed Clinic ("Rite of passage") or the other one where you have to save the doctor.
Also, at some point I noticed I've seemingly stopped encountering skull Maelstromers. This leads me to thinking the zones still have a level ceiling, and I'm overleveled for Northside at lvl ~22. With the added uncertainty about enemies' strength because you no longer see the levels anywhere on the UI, the "level scaling" of 2.0 is actually an improvement.
Regardless of the loot clutter being cleaned in 2.0, if you go on to methodically clean out areas of NCPD work/Gigs/Secondary quests, you still end up with way more money than you know what to do with. I guess this is where the money sinks of apartments, cars, and in 2.0, clothes come into play. I think some more balancing work is needed here - reduce the eddie rewards to make the player put some work. With Northside cleaned out I have around 240 000 eddies, not having bought any cars, apartments or guns. I once spent about 20 000 on cyberware but that was my only spending spree.
Having so much money trivializes the cyberware system, so you can have "one of everything" and swap cyberware according to the mission or personal preference. This may add some nice flexibility, but also break immersion.
Crafting. The cyberware progression aspect would have been ruined if it wasn't for the crafting system rework. The decision that the player has to spend the same resource on upgrading cyberware and upgrading weapons was very good. I find myself wanting to do NCPD work and gigs in order to farm more crafting materials. Finally some use of the NCPD missions!
Prospective work for modding. On the negative side, clothes being completely gutted as a system is bad, and I only hope mods fix this, as they had it fixed in version 1.63. All the car customizations will likely be back soon as well, as mods get updated for 2.0. Reduction of the rate of XP and money gain can balance out these economies so that the game resembles an RPG more. More pronounced differences in gangoons' weak/strong sides could also be good, though I'm mostly happy with them even now. Apart from whole systems, like faction reputations, being added through scripting those are the fields where I can see mods improving gameplay.
As for QoL mods like controls, UI, car handling, flashlights, custom radio, etc., etc., those more minor mods are always nice to have and will soon be available again.
! I mean the icons actually show sockets on the upgrades, why would they be one time use only? But I really hate the whole "iconic" whatever bullshit when sooner or later you will find a lower tier weapon that is even better. Give me one weapon of each kind and let me do my own iconic version with the upgrades!
