I'm with Digital Hellhound, going by the reddit post feature leak it looks extremely good, IMO--the diplomacy system being a direct iteration on the Crisis system, numerous things specifically being outlined because they're reworks of grievances with the original (like anarchism being libertarianism in 2,) and other things like that give me a certain degree of confidence. It's their Half-Life 3, so to speak, & I feel like using CK3 as a point of comparison, there's enough of a precedent for what a Victoria game is 'supposed to be about' that they're not going to have to dedicate a weird, clunky, years-long fixing-the-game-from-scratch project like they had to with Imperator and Stellaris. (& since the original Victoria 2 is pretty barebones by modern Paradox standards, I feel like it'll suffer less from the "new Civ game syndrome" CK3 has issues with.)
Paradox games do always come with caveats--I'm sure a year after release, they'll patch a slowdown bug that makes every country in the world check to see which ethnic groups they can commit genocide towards every month for the whole game, or something like that--but I think after the mana debacle came to a head surrounding Imperator, they've to some degree or another learned their lesson about making all the games just be about Number Go Up and Conquer Foreign Country.
The one feature I'm leery about is the provinces being HoI4 provinces. The last thing the AI needs is more complicated pathfinding decisions to make--I definitely think something based more directly off the Victoria 2 map would've been better, though the details remain to be seen (& admittedly I do like being able to split states--fixes the clunky decision workaround HPM had to make for treaty ports.)
I don't have much confidence in their ability to really pull this off, especially given the issues they had with the market complexity they had even in Vicky 2.
The AI can't handle the economy in Stellaris. Not too confident about how Vic3 will turn out.
You know, I somehow forgot about this. Hopefully Vic3's economy won't be completely rewritten every six months, which should help, but still.
The phrase "not a map painter" has really stuck with me for similar reasons. It'd be awesome if they could do such a thing, but they never really have, which makes me wonder.
I'm very curious how much of the workings of the market will be actually visible to the player, since Victoria 2's market was very much an It Just Works™ kind of thing where if you peeked under the hood you found out that sphereing countries caused goods to duplicate and weird stuff like that. The economy being as good as they make it out to be is definitely gonna make or break this one on some level, I think.
That said, I feel like the markets system replacing the sphere system, and the destruction of the global market, might help alleviate some of the weirdness simply by reducing the number of players involved in any particular economy. Not 100% confident on that point, but from what we've seen of it, it certainly feels a lot more intuitive and easier to strategize around to me than the dark-magic trade-netherrealms Stellaris and Vicky 2 operate on.