I love this game, its quickly become my go to. With over 600 hours at time of writing, I feel like I have a decent idea how this game works. Here is some fact checking:
1) This game is not pay to win, you can only buy skins with IRL money. You can respec your character's traits with IRL money if you really want, but you cant buy traits for free, you need to lose a trait to spend the trait points and it has to be a trait you've already unlocked.
2) The game doesn't look like the pre-alpha footage. What game does?
3) The graphics weren't downgraded. The 1.0 patch reset all video and game settings to default, Most of the players that reported a graphic downgrade just didn't realize their graphics settings were set to lower values.
4) There are not nearly as many hackers in this game as people claim. There isn't really a great way to tell if people are hacking anyway, but in all my time playing I've met really few people who I was sure were cheating, much less than any other shooter I've played.
5) The ingame community is full of great people. The quality of people you meet ingame is super high. Made so many friends from this game. This rule does not apply to communities outside of the game that are related to it (IE; Reddit)

I really hope you give this game a try. Keep in mind, while you are in Trainee mode, you only get matched with people who are also in Trainee mode, so your first few games may have very few players in it. This game has a thriving community, it is not dying. But there are fewer people on during regular work hours. So if your server region is already lower then others, this will result in longer queue times. If you need someone to help introduce you to the game, don't hesitate to add me!
-Doc out