Gaidan

On the plus side this makes future backing decisions easy.

No you will not. That will only be beta and if you will base your final opinion on beta version you are a fool. You will know once full release is out. By the time a game gets to beta its core gameplay is pretty well locked in. Gameplay stays in flux during alpha and beta is for polish and number tuning. I've been through a lot of alpha/betas in my gaming career and its exceedingly rare for significant gameplay changes to occur at that stage. Except they already said pathfinding is being reworked from ground up and it is not going to be ready for beta. And they said only a few feats will be ready for beta and the rest will be added afterwards. And people will complain about game being too easy or too hard based on one area. And so on and on and on... None of what you said contradicts what you quoted. By this far into development the core gameplay will definitely be in the game, even if it is always up for tweaking or additions.