I liked SZ, but it didn't have the same feel. My take is it is too cramped. In the original you had large expanses that often had leviathans. Open ocean was the scariest feeling. Part of the cause for the cramped feeling was the large overworld ice sheets which broke up the swimming gameplay, and felt very restricting.

All that said I loved the seatruck, and there are a bunch of improved mechanics and items introduced in SZ that have since been backported into vanilla Subnautica.