I think the thorns changes are fine, if you haven't already tried them out in game, I would recommend it. At high levels it basically adds just 1 more necessary hit from just running privacy field to kill the mobs. For farming low levels it makes essentially no difference. I think it needed a bit of a nerf at high levels since it was easily possible to use nothing but privacy field and heals and still easily kill things, that at least has partially changed now, since it's still possible to do it the old way but noticeably less efficient. Where the change was most important though, was in thick armour mobs, it was possible (I did it myself and reported it) to go to the rahu sewers and kill most of the mobs around the treants with just lvl 40 privacy field alone, completely unmodded, since most of the mobs there had such low hp. If it was possible to do it at lvl 40 unmodded, then I'm sure it would be possible at lvl 30 modded and hopefully I shouldn't have to explain why a lvl 30 farming a lvl 60 area was bad.
I like fairies so far, I haven't had a chance to try out their racial skills much yet because the fae realm starting area was so overfarmed that I put off doing the quests for a while, but I like the models, starting at lvl 30 and the flying. Also just kinda fun to start again from nothing but not sure I want to grind to max again.
I'm with ranperre about group dungeons, even as it stands right now, you can make about as much money per hour gardening as an experienced group can make at gk. Solo combat is even more lucrative since you just kill so many more mobs and skins are worth so much. I agree that equipment rarity is too good from dungeons but I feel like it needs some other way to earn money to replace it if you do nerf it.
EDIT: So I just completed the fae quests in the fae realm and I have to say they are very confusing. The first few quests make sense but then after that I was a bit lost. Having the additional quests from felmer, crelpin and midge only unlock after you've done some previous ones was a bit unintuitive when there was no text to suggest that they had new quests for me, and I think I ended up talking to every single npc about 10 times just to make sure Noita or someone didn't suddenly have a quest for me. I only really knew there was more to be done, firstly because I didn't have the fae racial skill which I knew existed from the patch notes and global, then secondly because people were talking in global about what recipes they had that I hadn't unlocked. I expect if people weren't talking in global about it, I would have just left, none the wiser. Also similar thing about the shortcut to Sun Vale, maybe it's just because I was already used to the fae realm before this update, but I only even thought to look for it because I heard people talking about it in global. So it might be useful to add this to the NPC dialogue.