I’m definitely keen to get those kind of functions later. As you say, there are plenty of threads on that subject… and I’ve basically contributed to/agreed with all the ones which have come up since I got here, lol!
However, the fluid physics and the water’s in-game functions should, IMO, be separate issues. Obviously the two are related and can’t ever be fully separated; however it’s a different matter to implement the water “functions” vs the water “mechanics”.
If the mechanics are deep enough (e.g. pressures, flow, carrying items along with the flow, temperature, freezing/forming ice, swiming and drowning, and so on), then players can get started doing all kinds of cool things even without any “functions” in place. It also means that, once the functions like crop growth are added, players will already have knowledge to share about good ways to manipulate water and get it where you want it.
I guess what I’m saying here is that while I want all the cool things to do with water, there’s a matter of priority. And my vote goes to mechanics first, functions/features second; purely because I can create my own functions when the mechanics are in place. And, looking at priority in the wider sense (priority of the whole game’s development, not just water), I figure it makes sense to put the water mechanics relatively high on the to-do list since that would mean the water mechanics are in place and stable at roughly the same time as the terrain building/moving mechanics. Together, those two systems allow players all kinds of freedom to build amazing structures, while giving Radiant time to look back through what will then be the newly-added features and monitor anything about them which isn’t working properly.
From there, they can move into other features, confident that the base game world is “solid” and won’t break no matter how players manipulate it. That gives Radiant the possibility to work on things like dungeons, new enemy camps, even new enemy types (which may do interesting things when faced with impassable terrain, e.g. flying or swimming); all with the knowledge that the terrain systems won’t be changing in the future. After all, there’s nothing worse than having one cool new feature break a feature which has been “finished” for ages; doing it this way would mean that the terrain systems are still fairly fresh in everyone’s mind when work goes ahead on other features which rely on that terrain system being in place (such as dungeons, which might need to carve through terrain. What happens when a dungeon crosses into a lake? Surely it’s better to have the water movement and lake formation finalised before answering that question, than to come up with a temporary answer and then realise later on that the temp solution isn’t suitable in the long-run…)
Of course, Radiant know most of this stuff already; I’m simply pointing it out as both a player perspective and for the benefit of anyone who might not have realised how inter-connected a lot of the coming features will be. But hopefully this perspective, and ones like it, help Radiant figure out their plans more easily (even if they decide to go in a different direction; which would be totally valid if, say, everyone else is more interested in fluid interactions with crops than in moving lakes around).