No one promissed any reworks, and the problems rised in the said thread were addressed in the update before.

Personally, this DLC is the only one I will refuse to buy (If I had the means). I tested it by playing with friends and really the implemented features seemed weak to me to see useless and more constraining than anything else. Maybe a future DLC will solve the problems but in the meantime, it has nothing to seduce. After that is just my opinion ^^

Thank you for leaving your opinon in large letters so it cannot possibly be misunderstood. ;-)

Sublustris is actually correct. Typically steam reviews for DLC come in early on and they don't usually change after a bugfix/patch. 

Many of the complaints surrounding the Penumbra DLC was that it was lackluster in comparison to Supremacy and Vaulters, the main gameplay feature didn't make sense and it had technical (bug) issues. Although it does appear to be lackluster when compared to Vaulters and Supremacy, honestly, the included features are about the same (with Vaulters only really adding pirate diplomacy, which is an objectively smaller feature compared to the espionage system). The confusion around hacking is easily cleared up once you play a campaign or two and the bugs were fixed. 

On top of that, the Vaulters and Hissho were highly popular O.G. factions from the original game and were highly anticipated to return in ES2 so it makes sense that the reviews for both of them are markedly higher (the Vaulters being arguably the most iconic and popular faction in the Endless series). 

I'm not saying Penumbra deserves an 85-90s score, but it certainly isn't deserving of a 50%, especially after the patch. And comparisons to the previous DLC's is neither fair nor does it look at the reasons as to why those DLCs were so well received. 

The latest patch did not contain many changes to Penumbra, indeed, but Sublustris has already correctly pointed out, these changes were the focus of the previous patches, notably Patch 1.4.3, Patch 1.4.6, and Patch 1.4.9. After these patches delivered the interface improvements mentioned in the “Penumbra Improvements” thread, along with bug fixes and balance changes, the threads were unstickied after they became inactive. They are still available both on Games2Gether and Steam.

We’ve been following the discussions of this DLC on Steam, Games2Gether, Reddit, and Discord, and the overall reaction was mixed: while some people felt that the benefits of hacking were not worthwhile, that it was not interesting to them, or that hacking anything becomes outright impossible at some point, others were pleased by the new take on espionage in a 4X game, and felt that the results of a properly timed and executed hack could be powerful to outright game-changing. Our intention was always to go out of our comfort zone with this feature, and to do something that hadn’t been done before. We understand this may not be everyone’s thing.

Nonetheless, if there are particular concerns with this DLC that you feel have not been addressed in the updates mentioned above, please refresh our memory on these concerns (if possible with a link to the relevant discussions).

Thanks!

Zebrech wrote:

You're saying something interresting : Hissho and Vaulters only add "small" features... And i think that's maybe the real problem that people who rate this dlc negativly have : The base game is actually complete enough to add only small features but the hacking is a huge one that change a huge part of the game, in a wrong way for many of us. Add the fact it was added in a messy way and you may be right when you say that a part of reviews need to change now some problems have been patched. However for me it still deserve 50% or less in this state because it's unpleasant to play.

Actually, I stated that the Vaulters were the DLC with an arguably smaller gameplay addition (the emphasis on "arguably smaller"). I think that hacking was included in a well-thought-out way that hasn't disrupted the main game too much (the inclusion of Behemoths actually received much more public vitriol than the Espionage feature, and yet the Hissho DLC is rated markedly higher).  The perceived disruption was a result of the confusion that came out of how to effectively utilize and combat the Espionage feature. 

everything was in my expectation

So... time to conclude ? It seems i wasted money for this dlc 'cause it will never be better. For the next one instead of trusting amplitude i'll wait for some gameplay before buying.