Thanks for the feed back and glad you liked the game! We are definitely in agreement with you on the difficulty curve and have a plan to (hopefully) make it a little more fun for new players and ramping up the challenge as you get deeper into the game.
The UI is coming along nicely (we have a few screenshots on our twitter account https://twitter.com/depthextinction) and has a lot more options for character customization and several new equipment types. We will be posting more about this soon!
Next steps: a possible update for the demo and early access.