Does the development team have no self-awareness?

It seems they have lost their vision and lost their way. It's like the blind leading the blind. It's just disheartening because I loved the game so much.

The nerf patch!

"We gotta prioritize handicapping the people who are having fun before we can get to the people who can barely play it!" - somebody on the dev team.

^
Right. First of all, I apologise for the sarcastic tone. I was a bit annoyed with the latest update, so I was venting.

Primarily, I'm annoyed with the Bloodstained team's inability to read the room. This project has always been taking the fans' feedback into consideration, which is something I greatly appreciate. But these last few updates have been completely inconsiderate to the fans' frustrations with the product we currently have.

It's frustrating to have the game in such a broken state. It's almost a truly amazing game that I could play all day. But last time I played (PC version btw), the game force-quit on me because I tried to use a bookshelf, which killed all of my momentum and optimism for the game, as this is around the fifth or sixth crash I've had. I just don't want to have to keep worrying about when the next crash is going to occur. And I've given up trying to play my Switch version, because it's just too unpleasant.

The community largely loves the actual underlying game, but just wants the game in a working state. This is why the talk of DLC and nerfing is so annoying - it's completely not where attention is needed right now. We love the game as it is, we just wish we could play it worry-free.

I can understand that these patches being made aren't slowing down the progress of the fixes.
But introducing controversial balance changes was absolutely not the right thing to do as part of the first post-launch patch. It gives the impression that the team are not on the same page as the fans at all.

It's this lack of understanding of the fans that gets to me. This project has always paid close attention to the fans, and has usually been excellent into taking fan feedback into consideration. But ever since the abysmal Switch version launched, the feeling is completely different. It feels like they don't really understand us after all, and every update since then has been so tone-deaf.
This is why I bring up the "overheating" issue too - Lying about the Switch version's performance pre-launch is a significant act of trickery the team tried to pull on Switch fans, and it still hasn't been officially addressed. It's another aspect that makes the team feel antagonistic towards the fans, whereas before, the communication was excellent.

To be fair, the nerfs are coming first because they're easier to do (like, just edit some spreadsheets, run a macro and recompile the source code easy).

What's true is that the community at large doesn't know this. Most people didn't know the costume DLC won't delay any updates to the Switch version.

That's the problem, I think: they assume people know, when in reality they don't. They need to work on communication, again.

I agree that the fixing the bugs takes priority, I'm going easy on them because this was their 1rst game made with Unreal Engine but this is the last time that I'll get a game like this.

I mean, just because they're taking survey's for future content doesn't mean they're not focusing on fixing things. They can multitask a bit.
There are people that are able to play the game perfectly fine and they need to that into account, too. If they didn't also at least acknowledge other content is coming in the near future, those people would be on these very forums expressing their discontent much like you are.

I really do hope the Switch version gets fixed since I plan to buy the game for that as well, but putting out a survey for opinions on future DLC isn't the end of the world

Most of us appreciate that, but it just doesn’t look good PR wise when you have some pretty major performance issues and you’re talking about nerfing things people are enjoying and cosmetics. Extreme (and not incredibly apt) analogy, but if you’re watching your house burn down, are you going to be amused by the guy who asks what color you want to paint it when it’s rebuilt, despite that the painter is not impeding the firemen from performing their duties?

Its pretty clear at this point they were blowing smoke about fixing things. They delayed the Switch game a week just to avoid the questions press would have had at the time. And kept blowing smoke up our tail pipe for a month and just hope people will forget about their promises to correct how badly the handled the switch version.