Damn, a lot to unpack here.

1. Broken launches aren't something to be tired of, imagine if everytime you bought a car it has to be recalled. Every Sandwich you ate gave you food poisoning. All of the tools you buy snap the first time they undergo a few foot pounds of torque.

This market runs on money, and the only way to combine them to put out functional games is to refuse to pay for sub par products. Anything less and they'll go "oh shit, we're still making money. I guess we don't need to provide anything beyond a tech demo to rake in 70 bucks + cosmetics, etc."

2. They absolutely lied about their systems. Fully functional crowds and AI? Bullshit. A cop system that actually works? Bullshit. They pop out of a hole in the ground and insta-gank you. If they can't even replicate decade old police technology that games like GTA IV managed to get right, then they should have just given you the "DONT KILL CIVILIANS" with a game over screen instead of some half-baked system of having police that spawn behind and instantly kill you. A total waste of a mechanic that they couldn't even fully implement or commit to.

3. While the game was mostly broken on last gen consoles, I have a fairly powerful desktop and still got game breaking bugs on occasion with only mildly infuriating ones fairly frequently. To say the game was GOTY on day one is absolutely mind-boggling. Your standards for games are clearly through the floor on this one if you really consider it GOTY on release lol I wouldn't even consider it that good NOW and I've just recently 100%'ed the damn game.

I'll agree that it got more hate than it deserves, but let's not swing the pendulum the other way and pretend this is some nugget of gold that people just didn't see. It was broken and got treated as such.