To summarize, I feel that, besides the significant performance boost which is obvious to end users and players, the internal improvements from MV to MZ(hardly visible from the outside directly) are also drastic enough to make MZ a new engine rather than just MVA.
However, I'm still a bit disappointed, because those improvements should've been even more drastic, and some of the code quality improvements currently absent in the default codebase could've made developing some plugins much less complicated and convoluted.
Nevertheless, I still don't regret going for the pre-order, as I think that it's worth the cost in my case(even though my savings are starting to be tight due to Covid-19), and I believe that the default MZ internals will become better and better(not just by plugins) as MZ gets updated later on(after all, the MZ internals should be noticeably different but can't be too different from that of MV right from the start, or porting MV projects/plugins to MZ would be a world of hurt).
That's why I'm slightly more inclined to give a positive rather than a negative rating(although I'd say that you might want to wait for a big discount), even though my feeling on MZ is actually quite mixed :)

To summarize, I feel that, besides the significant performance boost which is obvious to end users and players, the internal improvements from MV to MZ(hardly visible from the outside directly) are also drastic enough to make MZ a new engine rather than just MVA. However, I'm still a bit disappointed, because those improvements should've been even more drastic, and some of the code quality improvements currently absent in the default codebase could've made developing some plugins much less complicated and convoluted. Nevertheless, I still don't regret going for the pre-order, as I think that it's worth the cost in my case(even though my savings are starting to be tight due to Covid-19), and I believe that the default MZ internals will become better and better(not just by plugins) as MZ gets updated later on(after all, the MZ internals should be noticeably different but can't be too different from that of MV right from the start, or porting MV projects/plugins to MZ would be a world of hurt). That's why I'm slightly more inclined to give a positive rather than a negative rating(although I'd say that you might want to wait for a big discount), even though my feeling on MZ is actually quite mixed :)