i'm playing a little here and there. only passing familiarity with MH, so my opinion is probably terrible, but the little i played of mhw, i think i enjoy this more. someone made the comparison that mh is like magic the gathering and dauntless is like hearthstone. the animation lock isn't so terrible since you can dodge out of it at any time, so it's a lot more forgiving.
as far as the monsters themselves, they seem fairly standard play. figure out the moves then dodge roll to victory. i'm only a little ways in, so hopefully things get a little more complicated. i've really only used the longsword and the chainblades a few times. the chainblades have a cool gapcloser ability but i think i just prefer the longsword.
as far as game stability goes, apparently the forever queue issue was a software bug, not a server capacity issue. they have a bunch of cloud servers so there was plenty of space ON the server, it was just bottlenecking everyone for no reason. they went into maintenance mode for a little bit last night and my 100k + queue took about 30 minutes. everytime i complete a hunt though, it never actually takes me off the island, i have to relog in. so we'll see if that gets fixed too.
anyway, it's beta. it FEELS like an old school beta, not one of these current AAA marketing strategy, public and timed demo betas. people on reddit are PISSED. it's kind of funny because they keep referring it as "launch day"