While Road Builder for C:S II does not have the customization capabilities of its C:S I predecessor, this mod is built to support custom lanes once the asset editor arrives. This in turn will create endless possibilities and styles for your modular roads. This includes different sizes, textures, and functionalities…

I agree with OP in general. I also purchased UE and I am very pessimistic. But my concerns are not mainly about the bugs or if the game will be shelved due to some reason as suggested by some people in the posts.

My main concern is that the game is BORING! and I don't think it will change. Because the game designer wanted to give us a 'very realistic' city builder.

Usually, trying to achieve realism in game is a trap because most of the time, you cannot build something very real. But you still force it so you end up something broken, uncanny and/or very boring. A bit unrealistic but still fun is easier to achieve.

For the 'realism' of the construction aspect of the game, I can say that the only mentionable 'fun' thing (that is also different or improved from CS1) is building roundabouts. I can talk about more details on this but it's not the main point I'd like to say here.

For the 'realism' of the graphics, they tried to do something that looks more real (than CS1) for the buildings, people, cars etc, with the expense of taking the fun out of it. But they ended up delivering meh looking and very boring graphs. This problem also got magnified by the poor optimization during the game launch. Some examples:
- Night: Is there anyone who enjoys the night in the game? I cannot built anything or I cannot enjoy just looking at the city because I don't see anything. It's real, ok, but it's very boring. And as far as I know they still didn't fix or even address this. So when I was still playing the game, I turned the night off. And this is a very simple thing that they didn't care to implement, because, they care more about realism than fun.... Or their idea of fun is extremely different than mine :)
- Citizen Design: They all look awful and their animation is also awful. When you claim to have a 'realistic' city builder, then you should have proper looking citizens. They also don't match with the rest of the art style. They really look like an after-thought.
- Backyard of the houses or the farms... No comment.

For the 'realism' of the simulation aspect, again they tried to do something very realistic. As far as I understand, the game simulates every single citizen and then the rest is built around it. But they could never do that properly (in the realistic way) they wanted. And even if they did, it wouldn't be that fun. Because REAL LIFE IS NOT THAT FUN :). And this implementation results CPU problems when your population becomes bigger. So the game becomes slower and unplayable, and again 'kinda' real but very BORING.

For example, it would have been better if they do a bit higher level simulation like this:
- calculating how many people should do what and how long in one building. And then from there, assigning the tasks to random individuals in this building... This would still feel like a proper simulation but with much less CPU demand in bigger cities. See it's not exactly like real life, but you wouldn't know the difference anyway.

Same goes with the cars and citizens. They tried to make them too realistic with them breaking the rules, last minute lane changing etc. But when you check the game to see how cars actually behave, they start as very realistic, then they just stop acting real. They are in a deadlock, and they don't try to get out of that situation. Realism is only there to create problems, but not finding a solution.

Also, music and radio station is not up to CS1 quality. And it really bothers me. In CS1, the radio stations and the stupid commercials were really fun. In CS2, they are cringe and too repetitive. Of course this can easily be fixed, but I don't see that vision.

Ok this post is getting longer than I anticipated :) I can pinpoint so many other issues that gives me the reason why I think what I think. But I think in general, whoever did the 'game design', they did not do a good job (being generous here). And the whole game design needs a big change if this game will become something good at some point. And I don't think that will happen, because then it'll be a different game.

So I am sad :(

EDIT: I also have similar thoughts about the supply chain simulation. It's boring, it doesn't have any impactful gameplay effect.