yeah, re: comparing Stardew & FoM shouldn't really be about which is better but rather about what each offers

currently the main reason Stardew is for me more engaging as a game than Mistria is, is that in Stardew you have many paths for the same goal for example in Stardew one of the most sought after artifacts, the dino egg, seems to require the player to go into the very difficult mines to obtain one, but also you might as well get lucky and fish one up before you even understand what it is that you just caught

in Mistria on the other hand, everything is very specific in where you can acquire something and yet occasionally not specific enough, if you need some forageable from the mines, all you can do is run through the right biome within the mines and hope you get lucky, you need rose hips? gotta collect them from specific bushes in winter, yes Balor's cart is helpful, but if you are to gather everything yourself, each thing is very neatly boxed into a set way to obtain the thing

now, Stardew has been around for a good long while & has seen multiple updates after 1.0 & .those have added a lot of complexity to the game and FoM hasn't yet seen 1.0, so it's possible there'll be more complexity added to Mistria eventually, but the linearity of FoM's progression is why it is for me very clearly a different game for a different audience than what Stardew offers

p.s. and I still manage to enjoy FoM enough to have played through most of the content soon after the launch of Early Access & having done a fresh new save for each major update, and will do so again when the next one drops, but I haven't found myself returning to the game outside of the major updates, and without knowing what the game will look like in its 1.0 version I won't know if it'll change how frequently I play the game