What are the issues? And why 1644?
It's kind of involved to explain to someone who hasn't played the game, and in my view don't really show until you're reasonably good (100+ hours) at the game. One of the issues is a flat out bug: country cores disappear before they're supposed to (usually in 1644 exactly) due to a faulty calculation, which has a very significant impact on the game. It is possible to fix this by mod, but it will be fixed in vanilla soon.
The other is a rather complex problem, and I don't want to go into details due to the contentiousness of the issue, but it has to do with
the way player snowballing (the tendency for expansion to lead to even faster expansion) is currently inhibited. The fix I spoke of is that
the degree of this inhibition will be relaxed in the next patch, so the problem will fundamentally remain, but its effect on the game will be much reduced.
In any case, I like to answer questions about the state of the game like this: I am confident that anyone who likes strategy games will get,
at minimum in the worst case scenario, 100 hours of great fun out of the game, and that many get more. The median play time is in the hundreds of hours according to Johan, so you can make your dollar:fun calculation off that.
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