Okay, I've played about four weeks in-game so far, and must say that this is a far more pleasant game to play with this version. I do believe (and hope) that the game has finally turned the corner. My playthrough wasn't without its problems, but they were pretty minor overall and none were game-breaking. I stopped because I lacked time, not because I was just too frustrated to continue.
For three weeks of the game, things fit together pretty much as they were advertised to. I had the PC work as a lab technician, slowly built up the kinds of furniture that kept the PC happy at home, and engaged in selective social activities. The PC narrowed her sex choices down to two consistent lovers and was stress-free and satisfied. The work had a number of interesting random events, job performance was roughly predictable based on the effort and focus, and the start of a quest line at work was clear and interesting.
For some reason, at the beginning of the fourth week, the two lovers disappeared from the contacts list, along with about 2/3 of the other contacts. Gerald The G-man was listed in the lovers column instead, despite the fact that the PC had never dated him. I suspect that there is a mechanism to cull NPCs on the contact list when they haven't been contacted in some time (and I hope that that is true, because the list gets huge and unwieldy) but misfires sometimes and culls contacts it shouldn't. But even this wasn't game-ending, it just forced the PC to start to cultivate a new crop of contacts.
The world is more fleshed-out, and I'll probably start a new game to try a different career path.
But the thing that is significant is that I actually think the game was fun. Not just for the world-building and funny random events, but for the actual gameplay. Even the sex engine is interesting now, seeing a bunch of different PC and NPC responses to clicking on the "say something sexy" key, for instance. I am switching my verdict from "wait" to "play," and I'll be upping my support for ThaumX on patreon.