I thought the playtest Sorcerer was interesting, but not as the base Sorcerer. You were pigeonholed into a melee build, and as a caster, it felt too limited. It also felt weird to be "punished" for casting your spells, so to speak.
That's actually been my critique of most attempts to "fix" the Sorcerer, most of the attempts I've seen really want to thematically lock in the Sorcerer, and that's not what I want. I have only just gotten the Level Up version, and that looks a bit more promising.
Okay, these are actually some cogent criticisms, so before anything else, kudos for actually giving a meaningful answer rather than "I didn't like it" or "it didn't feel like a Sorcerer"--this is something I can respond to. It's still about preferences, but they're articulated and meaningful, which is both rare and extremely appreciated.
I'm not sure why you'd feel you're being "punished" for using your spells? Admittedly, the mechanics were quite rough (as Dausuul just said), so polish was probably warranted. But the whole idea was (in some sense) "unleashing the beast within." The
draconic Sorcerer has a physical-fighter "beast within," because dragons are physical powerhouses as well as magical ones. But other flavors--chaos, storm, cosmic, whatever else--could easily be
other types. Heck, that would be a great way to make the subclasses different. Storm becomes a controller flinging lightning bolts and dropping twisters and thunderclaps. Chaos lurks about, flitting from place to place, perhaps getting a bonus to attacking things it
didn't attack in the previous round. Cosmic becomes effectively stance-based, cycling through almost alternate personalities as different aspects take hold. Favored Soul even makes for a fascinating equal-yet-opposite, where the soul is being pulled, not toward dark ends, but toward
benevolent alienation, aiding allies but losing touch with the "human" (or "mortal") element. Shadow becomes a life-sucking leech and, dare I say,
phantom menace.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, this elevates subclass to a very high level, as might be expected for a class so thoroughly defined by
whom your magic blood comes from. Yes, it "locks in" a particular theme, but it does so because being related to a dragon should be
different from being related to a vampire.