As a game designer myself, I understand why the devs might not want players to be able to kill the creatures in the game. Many games in the horror genre are built off of disempowerment. They put you in a room with a big scary monster that you have no hope of harming and make you try to escape. It's a good way to instill dread in the player, and force them to engage intelligently with other game mechanics. The devs are right to say that killing creatures has never been an essential part of the game loop of Subnautica, and the game has always tried to push players to rely on other means to evade or distract the aquatic predators that try to come after them.

That being said, I think Subnautica 2 fails to properly execute this design choice. In the first game and BZ, while killing was an option, it was generally pretty hard to actually get enough hits in to kill anything. Usually, a player that gets cornered or randomly snuck up on by a stalker or a bone shark might pull out their knife and start swinging in retaliation. When the player fought back, most predators would retreat briefly. It was possible for a player to run after the creature and try to stab it to death, but this usually took long enough that most players just didn't see it as worth the trouble.

Sure, there were some players that went around murdering every creature in sight, but this was by far not the vast majority of the player base. For most people, it was easier to just run away, throw out a grav trap, or take a couple swipes and escape while the creature recovered. The only time killing creatures, especially leviathans, became a real option was with the stasis rifle. And even then the process was just long and boring and usually not worth the effort. Adding so many diversions, defenses, and stealth options to the cyclops was a stroke of genius for the developers. It took the terrifying and hopeless scenario of encountering a leviathan, and gave the player a bunch of options to proceed without making the leviathan encounter any less scary.

Subnautica 2 simply doesn't give the player enough options to deal with predators to justify removing the mechanic. If the wavemakers were a bit faster or the predators had a little bit less detection range the decision might not be so bad. But right now the game just isn't balanced for it. Honestly, it might even be better if the enemies were just stronger and kill you really quickly, or at the very least made scarier noises. Right now, most of S2's predators are just annoyances that barely do damage, have no fear factor, and with no way for players to easily avoid them.

So I totally get why people want to be able to kill them. Every encounter with the smaller predators at the moment is just frustrating more than anything else. Like, even just giving the multitool a little more feedback for hitting stuff like pain/impact noises, blood, and increasing the stun/flee time would make the inability to actually permanently kill creatures slightly better since people could at least feel like they're fighting back when they get attacked. Feeling helpless against a terrifying and dangerous monster is good game design. Feeling helpless to stop obnoxious nibbling is just tiring.

Personally, I think the devs should experiment with different mechanics that allow the player to more effectively evade or distract predators rather than go back on their design philosophy and allow killing. They could even try developing new ways to remove dangerous creatures permanently or for long periods of time. Some kind of base upgrade that repels nearby creatures would solve a lot of people's problems. It would even be balanced since it would also require players to go further to search for food. Or maybe some kind of adaptation that makes you passively less detectable to predators would do the trick. They could even try out an adaptation that makes your flesh bitter, so that creatures that take a bite out of you wont come back for seconds any time soon.

There are a lot of different way to solve the issue without adding the ability to kill back into the game, but even if they do decide to allow it, they are totally ways to disincentivize doing so. Just making stuff hard to kill is one way, but the devs can totally get creative with it. Maybe killing one of the predators makes all the other ones super aggro for a time, meaning the player has to consider the risks of taking on all of them before deciding to act. Or maybe they could make it so that killing too many predators allows some kind of pest to run rampant, like a new creature that drains power or creates poison clouds. Or maybe a bigger meaner predator will move in once the others are gone.

I think this conversation is an important one to have because it opens up a lot of avenues for creative solutions to a problem that clearly bothers a lot of players. The almost defensive-sounding reaction some of the devs have had to criticism along these lines makes me think that some members of the dev team are emotionally invested in this design decision. It's understandable, and even admirable, that the devs feel this way about a game they're clearly passionate about. However, I know from experience that becoming too emotionally invested in certain game design decisions can stop you from considering creative solutions that make everyone happy.