Well, I’ll be the one to say welcome to the forums! 
There’s no point me revisiting what @Geoffers747 said, so I am simply going to elaborate on some points.
The reason they’ve not made as much progress as predicted and perhaps you could say ‘broke a deal’, was to keep to another. By this I mean the fact that they’re delivering an Alpha having offered a Beta. Honestly I don’t see it matters too much, the name implies the amount of content that will exist and the state of bugs etc. but I think their Beta had Alpha-like qualities planned anyway. It’s still being delivered on time, which is great. But the reason they haven’t made as much progress as they would have liked to is because they’ve been reworking several systems to make them more moddable.
And to be honest, I feel a lot of progress has been made. Just to expand @Geoffers747 list, crafting, one of the core features of the game, now exists, having not existed at all in May. This is a grinding process, but they’ve made it even more so in order to save much more time later, as recipes will be easier to add in for them or mod in for us (and that’s actually done by exactly the same process). Building has been reworked since May, so it is now better than the pre-alpha videos showed. The engine, which has taken up a lot of the time, is now mostly there, certainly to support running the game and its core features. Tom’s collection of models is staggering, proven by the fact that in the Template thread there are 44 models, and nobody even considers being close to having half. Of course we aren’t shown everything in the streams either, this law enforced by Tony ;), to make sure we haven’t seen it all by release. Food and sleep are both systems that are on their way to being done, and Day/Night is practically finished.
You’ve got to give credit to Albert for doing random world generation so quickly. It took like just 2 months! And that’s a fairly chunky system, and will very much be needed.
Combat is actually not in the Alpha 1 because it is being reworked, so that it is better. I’m not sure whether the combat in their KS video actually worked in-game at all, I don’t recall hearing it either way. Combat was not good enough in their eyes, so it is not being included as it is not finished. There’s no point including completely obsolete combat, risking breaking other systems.
I can’t say I agree with your ideas that it’s progressing slowly, but oh well.