I've skipped most of this thread, but I thought I'd post some of my impressions so far as a player:
Chapter 1.
There was good and bad things about this chapter. It was fun, but I did feel like it did strain the suspension of disbelief at times. The whole Dragon thing felt very contrived, and I found the missions to be quite stupid. What kind of idiotic town doesn't store food in their keep? We're 1st level characters, why can't you send us some guards to help us? etc etc.
Cyanwrath at the end was a stupid encounter, so we decided to shoot him in the back and killed him after recovering our fallen party member.
None of us wanted to fight him in the first place but we were basically railroaded into it, because one of his prisoners was a new party member joining the group.
Being a spell caster low on resources and spending 80% of a chapter throwing around cantrips got a bit tedious after a while. Also the fact this started at night totally messed up our resting cycle for a while (we couldn't long rest until about 5am!).
Chapter 2.
This chapter was OK. The cult is way too small IMO, the numbers should be much larger.
I felt like we were railroaded into the ambush at the gate, which was basically impossible to spot (DC20!) and if the DM didn't "fudge" it by having the cultists jump down, it would have been quite deadly. I didn't even want to go in that way - I wanted to scout around the top first, but the module 'assumes' you go that way so we were kinda forced into it.
There was no foreshadowing at all (apparently we should have interrogated a captured Human cultists - we interrogated a Kobold) and we basically walked into a very deadly encounter almost impossible to spot. Bad encounter design right there.
Chapter 3.
Hard.
We are seasons D&D players with quite a bit of 5e experience by the time we came to this part, and it was still hard. We got through this part without any deaths but we were lucky. We ended up using the cultists traps against them using ball bearings into pits, caltrops, and things like that. We also made good use of choke points and the dodge action.
We parleyed with the roper, or that would have been a TPK right there.
Some of the placement of traps was a bit silly (in commonly travelled areas - also unguarded), but some others were good (under chests etc).
Overall apart from the difficulty of this area I didn't have an issue with it. Again though, being a spell caster I found running out of resources and having nothing left but cantrips a bit tedious after a while.
The festival in Eltruel was fun and I really enjoyed that, but it did seem silly that no one seemed to care the southern parts of the Sword Coast were being sacked and raided.
Chapter 4.
Absolutely terrible chapter that really strained the suspension of disbelief.
1. The CoTD is traveling with treasure wagons across land with minimal guards, what the?
2. Why don't they just take a boat since their cargo is so precious? It will be much faster and safer for them, especially since they have to go through the Marches of the Dead.
3. Why does no one care? They've sacked at least one important sword coast town and raided many more. The entire realms is acting like nothing has happened, yet it's up to a bunch of lowbie level characters to sort it out.
4. We've discovered what's in their caravans already, and considered completely throwing the rails off by getting the Flaming Fist involved from Baldurs Gate and have them all arrested, but decided to "play along" for the sake of the adventure.
This is probably the low part of the module. While it's still a fun game because of the banter and roleplay we have, I find it really strains disbelief.
Our DM is new to DMing, and as he learns stuff he is tweaking it more and more and making it better, but I've really felt some parts of this module have been poor. I also don't think it's very newbie friendly from a DM or players perspective. The fun from this game comes from all the good group banter we have and not the module itself. YMMV.
Yeah there's a bit of negative in this post (honestly, the Festival has been the only really positive part of the module for me so far - other than the good party banter), but I thought it's worth pointing out my experiences of this module from a players perspective so far.
I think the problem with this adventure is that it tries to show case too many different styles of mini adventures, instead of just focusing on a coherent story. Fix that and you've gone a long way to improving the module.
Also the player errata probably helps, because as a DM myself I find it a huge peeve walking into unspottablr encounters etc.