It seems to me that WU has become a game for hermits and recluses- myself included. I spend between 8 to 12 hours a day playing ( I'm 68, so have lots of time). I have over 9000 hrs of play. I love the complexity of the "recipes" for everything...including "real" recipes for food.
It is not a game for those who want instant play...there are quite a few servers with very fast settings, and many with vanilla settings...and many in between.
There are some PVP servers, and some servers with both PVP and PVE. I'm not into PVP so cannot comment on PVP play.
I have over 70 games in my Steam list...but once I started playing WU, I never play those games any more.