*shrug* a lot of people complain about this Granade guy, and I have to agree that C:DDA is getting shittier as time goes by, but on the other hand (despite this being an open source game) none of the critics have gone on to create their own forks. AFAIK you wouldnt need to roll back to 2013; you could simply download the code as is and go whichever way you want. So I can see his point: as of now despite the polemics there is apparently nobody else with the support or the will to take the helm (which I find curious, as many of the more outspoken critics were involved in development earlier on), so given that it's his work and effort, he calls the shots. I can understand that and empathize to an extent, even if I don't agree with the way he's taking the project.
As far as I'm concerned it's a damn shame that I don't remember at which point I started disliking his addons I'm guessing around mid 2017 (I could possibly match it with forum data I guess). The last time I played I was doing so with a homebrew mod that allowed me an easier start so that I could have fun exploring the world. Presumably I could do that in the current version, even though it probably wouldn't help with the more tedious stuff in the later builds. On the other hand, IIRC there were several mods that made many of those tedious features strictly opt-in...
Coolthulu made a fork.
I don't think it's active anymore, unfortunately. (unless something changed recently?)
AFAIK it is still available, though and IIRC it was highly playable, so I might roll back to that though.
EDIT: indeed, it's available, but not active. Since mid '17. So my guesstimate was correct
https://github.com/cataclysmbnteam/Cataclysm-BN/releases
This is gonna sound really weird given how much I bitch about the godawful shit Kevin & co. are doing with DDA, but I don't really enjoy BN much either. I have vastly more respect for Coolthulhu than I do for basically anyone involved in DDA dev these days, but it went too far in the
other direction for my taste. I really like Cata sat in that middle ground where you start out barely scraping by after everything goes to shit (and, indeed, can set things up so that you can play as a wild-man/LMOE/scavver more or less indefinitely if you so choose), with the
ability to scale your character up and start getting into all the weird sci-fi and high-post apoc shenanigans while still retaining the relatively mundane backdrop.
BN is basically just Cata with a bunch of extra Fallout-flavored shit added in, IIRC. Swung too hard in the direction of gameplay > realism with too-easy healing, cheap nuclear shit and energy weapons, &c., where current DDA is just a morass of idiotic unrealistic "becuz muh realsum" tedium. An action game rather than a roguelike (where current DDA is a clicking/travel/wait screen simulator rather than a game at all).