The visuals of the UI improved, I noticed that, but that's not a UX improvement. Overall UX is the biggest issue, which to me, feels just the same as always.
Sketcher is considerably better, IMO -- it can do so much more. There's an integrated flow for Sketcher from Part workbench now, too.
(Gets even better in 1.1, too -- and there are new changes coming to the core datums)
I personally don't think overall UX is the biggest problem, if you're prepared to learn it. I've used much worse software than this, and I think a lot of people are just moaning that it isn't "immediate" or "easy". I particularly don't understand criticism of it from the OpenSCAD direction: that's often just misinformed whining from people who hate GUIs and don't believe they can offer anything over text.
Since the new Assembly workbench and the TNP mitigations were added I think it's on pretty solid footing; you can do many things more easily in Part Design now than before, based on geometry edges rather than sketch edges.
One thing I would suggest is using the tab bar workbench selector rather than the dropdown: for some reason that makes the whole thing so much more fluid.
The biggest problem is still, ultimately, robustness.
