I gave it a try and defeated a dragon as well. Here's how i managed to get strong without
dying being brutally murdered because of the level scaling : I got into fights with anything stronger than me, got hit until i was half-HP (for hardiness XP), then ran. I also almost exclusively killed things that drop money, and bought the best polearm i could find. I then leveled up the polearm skill the same way, and as it got harder and harder to find things i couldnt kill in one hit, I allowed myself to gain levels. I eventually crossed paths with a yellow dragon, and killed him in 2 hits.
I haven't tried crafting yet in the new version -mostly because it's much harder now to find a cave on purpose, thanks to the new map system- but if it's the same as in the previous version, there's a balance problem right there. In v2.8 I wasn't able to get better metals than bronze before the level scaling started throwing lvl 15 creatures at my lvl 8 miner. Sure enough, i was able to run away most of the time, but eventually over hundreds of encounters, i died. Because it took a VERY long time to get enough metal to level up mining, smelting, and smithing. On the other hand, shopping in a few towns gave me excellent steel weapons quite easily. Not to mention the skills you have to sacrifice to get mining+smelting+smithing. Maybe Smelting and Smithing could be a single skill instead of 2 ?
Anyways, no bug so far with the new version, but as i said earlier, moving around is really hard now. Even if maps seem common in shops, I never had the proper map for the place i was in. I've been running around blindly for 10 levels, basically.
Edit : it could help if we were able to map our own travels so as to be able to get back to places we already visited.
Edit 2 : here's another dragon that i one-hit killed :
Edit 3 : well looks like i lost my spear guy to a bug : i was in the selling screen, but didnt want to sell anything so i typed "0" when asked for a number, and it crashed.
(by the way, is "proficient" better than "fine" ?)
Edit 4 : Another request : could there be a way to smelt a batch instead of only one at a time ? Something like :
Are you sure you want to smelt tin ?
>Y
How many bars do you want ?
>5
smelting failed
smelting success
smelting success
smelting failed
smelting failed
and then go back to the town menu. Kind of how we can choose all of our skills in one go now.
Oh, and while i'm at it : i noticed that some foes have weapons, yet we don't seem to be able to loot them. Why not ?