Thing is, I played this game since launch Day 1, and have done multiple playthroughs of it.
I'm something of an enthusiast, both for the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG setting, and also for video game RPGs in general.
The expectations at launch, as far as I'm concerned, were not only completely attainable, but entirely reasonable.
The expectations came down to this: Multiple factions to ally with. Reputation system where being friendly with one faction would garner a negative reputation with rival factions. Another Reputation system in terms of overall fame as a merc in Night City. Choices players making earlier on in the game that shape the outcome of events later on in the game. Cyberware upgrading your primary attributes and augmenting one's playstyle. Modifiable weapons.
The clothing players wear impacting their first impressions with NPCs, or how well they blend in/stand out depending on the environment.
Variety in terms of guns, weapons, and armor, each suited to different kinds of situations and/or jobs. Both players and enemies actually having body armor accounted for in damage and defense. Multiple ammo types for guns, which players could switch between depending on the situation.
Aside from installing cyberware, the vast majority of these sorts of mechanics and features were in Fallout: New Vegas.
New Vegas had a mechanic where most minor NPCs would see you wearing a factions' clothing, and would recognize you as either an ally or an enemy on the basis of wearing that factions' clothing. This could even be used to infiltrate a faction and explore without arousing too much suspicion.
This was the case not only for the major factions, but also for most of the minor factions in the game as well.
In Night City, the major factions would be the Corporations and their alliances and rivalries.
The minor factions would be various rival gangs on the street.
In the TTRPG, your fashion sense was important, and depending on the social sphere you're involved in, you're either going to want to blend in, or to stand out. If you're going to a bar, you'll want to stand out. If you're attending the exclusive nightclubs where the rich and powerful go to, you're gonna want to wear the latest and trendiest fashion. In a corporate environment, formal business clothing. People will comment on it Corporate logos? Gang colors? Depending on the environment, people'll either love you or hate you based on your looks alone.
This sort of system isn't an unreasonable expectation, as it's an important element of the setting. However, people would probably let even the lack of this sort of system slide, if there were a good reputation system in place.
Unfortunately, the only thing "Street Cred" affected at launch was your ability to see and buy guns, clothes, and cyberware from different venders. [I think later updates made it affect what job opportunities were available to players, but even then that's a rather minor change in the grand scheme of things.]
And on that note, what people really expected, ultimately, was an RPG, and where combat had a wide variety of options and approaches depending on player build, and where weapons behaved in a somewhat believable manner.
Cyberpunk is the Dark Future, and a certain level of grit is expected in the combat. One would think that weapons, armor, and cyberware would be a big factor in the toolkit for both players and enemies.
Instead, what we got was bland looter shooter bullshit, where guns and melee weapons somehow have "levels" that can be given a generic upgrade for increased damage, by "levelling up" the gun or sword. Armor behaves similarly, for defense. Worse yet, weapons and armor are locked off from even being /equippable/ by players on the basis of the player "not being a high enough level" for the weapon. Utterly absurd!
Melee weapons should do a fixed amount of damage, that only increases through a strength bonus determined by a players' BODY attribute. Bladed weapons, at least, should have the advantage of being treated as armor piercing against soft-armor [I.E. kevlar clothing]. Incidentally, this'd be why cybernetically grafted armor is a big deal, because being a composite of metal and hardened plastic, it should offer much better protection against bladed weapons.
Guns should do damage on the basis of what bullet caliber they shoot. Armor should be rated in effectiveness in terms of what calibers it can stop, or at the very least, slow down. While low-caliber handguns will never be completely useless, there should be certain situations and certain factions where it'd be wiser to bring along something of a higher caliber.
Gun modding also could've been of the sort where you could do things as seen in Solo of Fortune 1 & 2: Alternative barrels for guns to chamber higher caliber bullets, extended magazines for double if not triple ammo capacity, the ability to attach a Smart Link to your gun, options for stocks and/or braces to improve accuracy and handling recoil, being able to turn semi-auto weapons full-auto and vice versa, etc... While New Vegas may not necessarily have gone this far, there are plenty of other games that have given players this level of customization for guns.
Atomic Heart, for example, gave players options for alternative stocks for dealing with recoil, extended magazines, and even alternative frames for the different guns players had in-game. [You had to unlock some of these upgrade paths by exploring the game's world, but hey, they were there.]
The biggest sin of Cyberpunk 2077, aside from opting for looter shooter game design in what should be more of an immersive sim game, is that it gets the relationship between cyberware and primary attributes backwards. Why should I have to level up my Reflex attribute to install cyberware /designed to enhance my reflexes to surpass human limitations/ according to tabletop lore?
Why should I need to level up my BODY stat to install Titanium Bones, various other muscle enhancements, a second heart, and a pain editor, when in Cyberpunk 2020, I could install Muscle & Bone Lace, and Grafted Muscles, and /installing these bodymods/ would give me +4 to my BODY stat?
That system was completely backwards to how cyberware should've been handled. While they did eventually upgrade the Gorilla Arms to give a buff to BODY for purposes of damage and carrying weapons [credit where credit is due], there's still just a lot of bizarre game design decisions that show that the devs really didn't have a coherent vision on how to put this game together.
What had the potential to be a really good game, even a great game, ultimately turned into a very mid game with a lot of missed potential and really botched game design decisions.
TL:DR: Cyberpunk 2077 should've treated the Cyberpunk 2020 Core Rulebook, Blackhand's Weapon's Guide, and Solo of Fortune 1 & 2 as gospel for game design, and should've seen New Vegas as the template to follow. I wouldn't care if they had to scale down on the size accessible in Night City, or even the length of the game, if it meant more branching paths, choices actually mattering later on down the line, and a wider range of different endings.
Gamers were also entirely right to expect more out of the game than what it launched with, and the way it is today, given that other video games had already done more in the past.
Lastly, CDPR is to blame for hyping up the game and showing off features that would end up being cut from the game later anyhow.
