I bought the game when it was released but actually haven’t really played it yet. I just wanted to support this type of game because the gaming world needs more games that provide extremely high replay value and are complex at the same time.
The steam version is actually pretty approachable. You can mostly learn all of the systems on your own time. You don’t have to interact with everything at first.
I played CDDA for a while about 5 years ago. I really enjoyed it for a while, but after a certain point it seemed like the devs just got more interested in simulating fiddly minutiae to micromanage in excruciating detail over actually developing interesting new content or fixing existing broken systems.
NPCs were an absolute mess around that time, but the devs were messing around with implementing individual vitamin and mineral meters and making installing bionics more fiddly.
As a dwarf fortress lover, I was never interested in either of those because you can't "win". For me the entire point of the hardship of a rogue like is to overcome the difficulty and reach the goal. I don't want an endless roguelike sandbox, I want a challenge with a carrot at the specifically defined end.