I'm liking the DLC a lot. Nobles seem maybe a little bit overpowered (the free Imperial reinforcements on a 45 day cooldown are very effective meat shields) but they're balanced by getting increasingly more useless outside of combat the more you rank them up. Some of the psychic abilities are really fun -- giving you a taste of the high-level powers right off the bat by letting you temporarily use a high level noble as the first quest is a great design decision -- and Tynan's mentioned plans to add even more soon, so... that'll be cool. Re: pricing, it's whatever; the only games I've put more hours into than Rimworld are CK2 and Dota 2, and Tynan could drop another 10 expansions at this price point and the hours-per-dollar rate would still be a few orders of magnitude better than 99% of my Steam library. As long as the tempo of future DLC releases/breaking updates doesn't obliterate the modding community, I'll be happy to keep throwing money at Ludeon Studios.
Like, I hadn't touched Rimworld for about a year, and then when Royalty hit, I played 50 hours basically nonstop and could easily see myself putting in another 50 (and maybe a couple hundred more once Combat Extended is updated). Combat, with the addition of so many new abilities, just feels a lot more dynamic and tactical -- there's just so many more options!
Oh, right, possibly the *best* change so far: 1.1 switched to an incremental garbage collector, which means poorly optimized mods that generate loads of garbage per frame won't cause second-long stutters every 30-40 seconds. That was the reason I stopped playing 1.0: it was just infuriating to be smoothly scrolling around only for the game to lock up constantly every time the GC ran. You could mitigate it by keeping your modlist tight and bloat-free, but even with only a few dozen mods it was still present.