[2021] How are people feeling about the game?

I am coming over from way too many hours spent in Monster hunter, and before Rise releases next month I thought I'd check out dauntless, I'm enjoying myself so far, art style is beyond incredible, seriously the artists at Phoenix Labs are some of the best in the industry!! The cash shop for a F2P game seems really fair at first glance! I'm having some issues with the power progression at the moment I seem to remember in Beta there was a similar grind to monster hunter in that you kill monsters, get parts, upgrade armour, now it seems more like I have to grind the same weapon type to level it up and only at level 20 can I enhance my gear? I may be reading that wrong, anyway I just wanted to see how the community feels about Dauntless right now, there's not a hell of a lot of hype surrounding it, is it quite a healthy game from a community stand point? how're we feeling about mechanics? recent changes, controversies, positives etc? I want to hear it all :)