I am actually playing with a 20th Anniversary vpet right now. It's honestly basically this unforgiving.
In the Vpet you need a 90% or better win rate for most top mons and it's random if you win or not. A well trained mon can lose to a low level fighter, killing the streak. You must check at least 3 times a day or get bad results up to a dead mon. And each mon is a new run. No forward progression carries over except for adding mons to the list of mons you have seen.
Diferences? The trust system is a huge issue. This wasn't in the Vpet! There doesn't seem to be any way to make your mon trust you. Once trust is lost, you are doomed to bad results. Training is a lot more interactive here but it's also a lot harder. Failing training causes trust loss which makes not being able to recover trust a serious problem.
I haven't tried the Discord for feedback yet so I can't say about it. But, really: Digimon are hard to raise and this game isn't much different from the real ones. If they fix the trust issue and upgrade the server I think it is doing fine.