I would say what I said seven months ago still stands:
In my opinion, it's only good if you are a compulsive restarter, because you get to do the early exploration again and again and again. You can get a good 20-30 hours out of it. If you get to the mid-game though... it's bad, and it's probably going to keep being bad for a good year or more, until (if!) they decide to give the player options for the peacetime which, looking at EUIV, might be never.
And on the other hand, if you enjoy DW:U, would you really want to play a more casual version? Because that's what Stellaris is, in the end, DW:U or SotS for those who don't have the time or the interest to play those two (nevermind Aurora).
If you haven't got any moral problems with piracy, why not "demo" it? If you see something you enjoy, you can always buy later (but, again, be not mislead by the early game, as I was, that's 30 € I'm never getting back
). If you don't want to pirate, and have no problem waiting... I'd do that.
It's been almost a year since release, and the game has received a couple of shitty cosmetic DLCs, one "story pack" (fucking Paradox, I swear...), and NOW it's getting a DLC with things that should have been there from the start, like consistent internal politics, different rights for different aliens, and some other crap that I forget. But nothing game changing as far as I can tell. Nothing addressing the abysmal combat, nothing addressing the idiotic diplomacy... basically nothing addressing anything of importance, but adding new systems so that everyone can see how broken and buggy they are and Paradox can pretend to get working on bugfixes
momentarily! to justify the 20€ per DLC.
It's going to be, it seems, a long, bumpy ride, full of small steps ahead (that way you can charge for each and every one of them), and with a more than uncertain destination, because looking at EUIV and CKII, Paradox never seems to know what the fuck their games are supposed to be, adding instead whatever tickles their fancy, even if it lacks any sense, and fucks the game up in every possible ways (see Rajas of India, for example, and thank god for it, since it probably dissuaded them from adding China to the mix).
Meanwhile the bloke who made DW is bunkered up somewhere in New Zealand, applying all of his autism to, presumably, build on the base of what he already has an even better thing, new engine, new systems, etc. From time to time he appears in the Matrix Games forums to say that he is working on it but he's not going to say anything else until it's something interesting, which could mean anything really, at least in regards to a release timeline. One day is going to pop up and say "here it is!", and as everything made by a couple of friends instead of a committee of Swedish squareheads, is either going to be great, or utter shit.
Which I guess is more that you can say about Stellaris, which is probably never going to be great, and is right now utter, horrible shit.
Sorry for the rant, those 30€ still sting pretty bad.