A few shared perks is all your group needs (1 into lock picking for Forge Ahead, 1 into Engineering to get the other Intellect books for your main crafter). Outside of that most everything else is the same (My group has been playing since A18 and we barely changed our playstyles, we just changed up a couple of things to adapt accordingly, even with two of them being negative about the loss of the jars, now they love not having them around and find the skill changes rather fun)... and the playthrough for vanilla is pretty much the same since once you get to high gamestage it is all about making enough iron & steel to maintain everything, farming parts, cranking out ammo and crafting endless duct tape while holding off the chunky hordes until you feel like you done it enough to start over with a fresh file. -- And trust, while my group does the mining, farming, etc separately we do most of our quests together once we get Tier 3 (when infested quests become worth doing in pairs or grouped).
And if you really miss the old crutch of jars that badly, the modding community made solutions -- thankfully that's why modding communities exist, to provide alternatives when main development doesn't offer something the player base might want.
The things I can agree with people on are the changes to crucible & solar panel rarity, and the fact water filters in the wild are crazy hard to find if there's any real gripes to the A21 system to be had.
End input on my part for this thread.