I've experienced the bugs you found and it made me just as angry too.
This smells like a forced deadline, obviously they want armoured fury out the door, even they would have trouble releasing a booster pack within a month or two of a game sequel. But the community doesn't help itself here, everyone wants the new patch and they want it yesterday and this can force a developers hand as well.
In my opinion it is pretty poor that they are adding features like co-op and a vehicle drop and squad leader spawning etc (things that I didn't see requested) and then putting out a patch that doesn't fix well known bugs and actually creates a slew of new ones. I don't really buy the EA conspiracy of trying to make us move on, in fact since the community is moving towards a new game release EA should be making the game as attractive as possible, if this patch had fixed everything I would have been more likely to buy 2142 than I am now.
The whole game has been somewhat of a disappointment, as far as I rememeber the game was due to have things like night vision and zip lines from the off, instead they cut those features and made us pay for them by buying SF, an expansion that requires you to load a totally different exe to play it (wtf?). Not to mention that SF takes much longer to load and needs much more RAM than vanilla. Then they make a booster pack like euro forces that was massively over priced for what it was. In between they have managed to add bugs with patches (rememeber patches are supposed to fix a game, if they introduce a problem then they have failed horribly).
In fact the thing that bugs me most about this game is the load time, I just tested it, here it is:
0secs - Click SF icon
19.5sec - Login box appears
35.4secs - Game is loaded
This is half a minute just to load the bloody program, most of which taken up by the login process why does this take so long?
I sort server list and click on a random server, has to be random because the server browser jumps around all the time and I cant pick the server I want anyway. Happens to choose a leviathan map server. Because the patch reset my graphics and i havent played this map, I have to optimise shaders.
8:19 - Map is loaded
Yes that is right 7 minutes and 29 seconds to load a map, does this sound like a piss take to anyone else? Over 8 minutes to get into a game, lets compare that to quakeworld at around 15 secs, counterstrike at about 1min and any game console which is about 30secs.
The best thing is, with this patch I could have waited all that time, click join server and get an instant crash to desktop with no error. If anyone thinks I am being unreasonable by complaining about a game I have so far spent about £65 on I would suggest you keep your comments to yourself.