This shit is impressive to say the least. The graphics are eye cancer inducing though.
It's looking like a game it's more fun to tell stories about than to actually play, which is often the case with sandboxy games; every time I hear the guy say "and after 10 mins of x, I still had nothing" I get reminded not to download it yet.
Experiencing a truly fun/ good emergent story by playing yourself is better than to hear about it.
And you'd have to play to tell any you experienced yourself. What fun would it be to tell other people's stories?
Also if there were no potentials for "[10m of blah and still no real progress]", solving stuff could hardly feel good when you do?
The stuff that gets generated and simulated and the freedom the game gives you to use your time however you like is good.
What helps it as well is that you can have three cases concurrently going and abandon any you feel has no leads left to make it not uber tedious.
But sure, it's a time-sink still.
If you mess up and reach the scene far too late or get caught there and end up in the hospital there may be little clues left for you to go on, here murder cases are easy because the
murderer will strike again.
Fresh runs on the highest difficulty can be tricky. But with the cases you can still sort of choose your own difficulty (same with city size and resorting to use the government database).
Murder cases can be especially so, they choose you so-to-say and not vice-versa and they feel urgent because having the murderer kill
off some shop clerks next or so would be annoying and lower the appeal of the city you play in as that character.
If on the other hand you get kitted with good synth-disk upgrades that does not help the challenge.
As said it's already good for what it is, I doubt waiting more here will change much if anything at all about the point you raised.