Yes and no. I expected a bunch of things in the game to be weird or even broken. I expected a few things nobody discovered to jump out and kick me in the 'nads, like the armor repair thing. I expected the sledgehammer.
But I didn’t expect to be unable to play. This thing with freezes and crashes and authentication failures and whatnot seems to be happening more often lately than it used to.
And as someone who works in software development, I know it’s likely to happen when you start ripping chunks of code that are buried deep (like when they introduced Funcom Live Services), but I also know that you’re supposed to test the shіt out those changes. 
Well, that’s neither here nor there. Yeah, the fish traps were just free resources and would get you to the point where you could stockpile oil and ichor infinitely. So that needed fixing. And queen bees aren’t rare the same way the Final Breath of the Red Mother is rare, but they’re onerous to get given the new mechanics of armor repair.
I’m not logged in right now, so I have to pull this from my memory, but if I’m not mistaken, one perfected heavy padding requires 31 hardened leather. Each piece of epic heavy armor you repair requires one padding, so if you want to repair a full set, it’s 155 hardened leather, and that’s 775 oil. In the improved fishing traps, the queen bee will give you 90% chance of exotic fish and 10% chance of rare fish. That means that you’ll need 862 queen bees “on average” (using a naive, oversimplified approach to probability and statistics) to repair a set of armor.
My prediction is that repairing armor in the bench is going to go out of vogue and everyone’s gonna start using patch kits. It does breathe a new life into kits nobody ever used, like master armor patch kit, but it feels like a really weird way of making fringe items useful. 
Holy crap, yeah, fish trap spam was awful on officials. I’m not kidding, it was causing bad blood between clans because everyone wanted to spam traps in the few places where they could.
On the other hand, that was a perfectly avoidable situation, too. When the dev teams made it impossible to place fishing traps in a large well, it wasn’t hard to foresee that people would flock to the rivers and lakes to do so. But when they made it buggy and impossible to place them in perfectly reasonable spots where they’re submerged in the water, that made it orders of magnitude worse.
I know that bit of wisdom and I always play on patch day. I don’t come here to complain about it, because I usually can play on patch day and I have set my expectations to “chaos and mayhem”, so I’m busy playing. This thread is the product of being unable to play, because someone at Funcom has been extremely irresponsible.
Either this freezing-and-crashing thing was old enough to have been detected earlier but they didn’t test it enough, or it was a last-second change that someone pushed through without testing, so nobody had a chance to detect it. I’m betting on the latter, because game development industry has this gung ho mentality where it’s perfectly fine to cram in bits of code a few seconds before you deploy it.
It freezes often. And for other people it crashes. There’s a bunch of threads about it and Funcom acknowledged it and said they were working onit.
Isle of Siptah is Early Access. Exiled Lands and the common code isn’t. And even if they wanted to put the whole game back into Early Access, I don’t think any respectable publishing platform – Steam, GOG, Epic, pick your poison – would let them. And frankly, that would be enough to send even someone like me, someone who has been accused of “white knighting” this game, packing.
Almost everything I wrote about in my post affects the whole game. The only Siptah-specific detail was the annoying hum.