Man, I would play this game if you picked a class to start and were immediately able to do one thing effectively, albeit slowly and/or poorly. Over time, you would be able to grow both better at tasks you know and learn a broader set of related skills... but you would never reach a point where you don't need or can't use things new players make, and you can't learn how to do everything.
The biggest mistake that Haven and Hearth did was probably quality. As it is, if you don't own the very best resource deposit of its type in the world, your goods are worthless. Oh, and boy are those deposits rare. Add to that the fact that in about ten minutes, the same three or four players end up controlling all the best resources, and twenty minutes from the start of the game, ALL the mines are taken... it's absurd.
I want to play a game where a group of specialized people can cooperate to build a village with the minimum of fuss. I want permadeath, but that needs to be moderated by rather fast character growth- trust me, the fact that I died and lost a weeks worth of skill growth and items and now my land is at risk of invaders and decay until my new character can take care of everything is enough. Making it take many months of 8-hour-a-day work just to get back to where I was is ridiculous.
Oh, and then there's the animals... Look, I know your artist is a phallus-obsessed lazy little swede. That doesn't mean that getting one-hit-killed by a fox a week after starting the game is a good game design decision. Tinge the spites gray or something and call it a wolf.
And the stats system... euughhhh.