Thanks for the advice, appreciated. Maybe I'll give in and finally give it a real go. I just don't want to have to start over like before.
I advise against it - the very fact that the called buggy beta "1.0" doesn't make it any more playable. This pile of bugs probably would be approacheable without disappointment somewhere around version 1.12 or so. At the moment - even such a basic thing as calling quicksave at the wrong moment will silently (!) provoke gamebreaking bug. And there are no concrete plans from devs to fix that. So IMO waiting is the best for now.