Well, I got to play version 8.5.4 for a while now and it is definitely an improvement over 8.5.3.1_hotfix. It still has bugs in it, but I only encountered one that was kind of game breaking, but restarting the game cleared it up.
I don't know if the Dev reads any of this, but just posting it anyways for my own sanity.
On the upside, the character creator worked fine for me.
The fisherman quests and all other quests I tried, worked just fine.
The nursery and milking station worked just fine for me. You need slave collars, which you can get from freeing the women inside the various dungeons.
The game does seem to perform a bit better on my old machine. It still lags pretty bad in the town and in Sanctuary, but for the most part it is okay.
Disabling/unchecking Nanite in the graphics settings really helps performance, however, on anything other than Epic settings, some of the graphics looks kinda crappy. But, I could get about 40FPS on medium settings with my old GTX 970.
Bronze nails got nerfed pretty hard. It used to be that you would receive 5 nails for each bronze ingot you used, now it is 1 nail for 1 ingot. If you use the repair kits to fix your gear, that is a lot of copper to mine and craft into ingots to make nails for the kits.
The game still has bugs, they just aren't as game breaking as things were an update or two ago.