My main gripe is with the 'damage' system that gives you 150 damage and stalls the truck if you touch a rock at the side of a tarmac road, or gives you 62 damage for going over a crest.
Which truck were you using? Some are more sensitive than others, from my experience the Kamaz (orange cab-over) is especially easily damaged, I suspect because of its limited ground clearance.
The camera is also still crap, why they couldn't fix this after the tech demos and betas is beyond me.
This I can absolutely agree to. Once you get used to it the camera becomes
workable, but it's still very cumbersome.
I came across a tree in my path and I remembered that in the tech demo you could fell trees (this is apparently an achievement too so I'm not wrong about it), so I tried to use the grappler crane to get a tree. Now if you were designing controls of a multi-axis crane, it would make sense to have those axes controlled separately. Instead they have tied the controls of multiple axes to multiple buttons, meaning that when you press one the crane will do what you want, accompanied by other actions that might completely counter what you had previously done.
The crane is another thing that is pretty obtuse. Probably because you'd intuitively expect to control each of the crane's axes seperately, but they've set it up so that you basically control the position of the grapple.
On a controller the scheme is as follows:
left stick up / down -> raise / lower grapple
left stick left / right -> rotate grapple (if activated)
right stick up / down -> move grapple inward / outward
right stick left / right -> rotate crane
With some practice you can get good results, but it's still fiddly and a bit of a weird system.
By the way, I don't think the crane is really capable of felling trees, only picking up loose logs lying around or spilled by a capsized truck.
Also the winches are pretty poor. They appear to only have a few metres of cable, which is complete rubbish for trucks of this size, and don't seem to be powerful enough to pull these trucks or fell trees, which I'm pretty sure would be possible with the real thing. Still disappointed.
I heard that the length of the winches was a conscious gameplay decision, because the devs found that (realistically) longer cable made things too easy. The trees you can attach the winch to are all static and can't be felled anyways. The smaller trees and saplings where you can't attach the winch can be felled by driving over them with a big enough vehicle and enough momentum.
How did you use your winch? I haven't really found them to have too little power. One (unintuitive) thing you have to pay attention to is that when you enter advanced mode to use the winch, your vehicle automatically applies the parking brake and won't respond to throttle inputs. So you have to attach the winch, deactivate advanced mode, then pull and apply some throttle. I've encountered very few situations where I wasn't able to get myself unstuck with the winch.