The tools story that you raise is a real challenge, for users and for the team. I agree with you. As we were reaching RTM, we realized we had gotten ourselves wedged, pretty significantly. We had fortune 500 customers in production on our pre 1.0 RTM betas who were pushing hard for a 1.0 RTM runtime stack. At the same time, we came to the conclusion that the tools were not ready and needed significant changes (many of them breaking, as you call out). We decided to ship the runtime as RTM (now twice) and leave the tools in preview. The customers who were pushing hard are now happy (modulo the tools changes) and we're continuing to push forward.

If we were to do it all again with the knowledge we have now, we would skip all the changes and move directly to the final plan. We're sad about the resets, both to our users and because we were not nearly as efficient as we could otherwise have been. We're now on a much more solid plan and are working to land it.