So was the mod.
The thing that made DayZ "DayZ" was the personal journey that every player embarked on with nothing but a gun and some beans against a hoard of AI characters with or against other players.
The alpha for the mod was janky as hell, but it had a limited amount of equipment for players to scavenge, with anything that made you survivable being pretty rare, a NECESSARY foil in the infected/Zs whatever you want to call them, vehicles to try to repair. The mod got progressively worse as time went by and Rocket kept fiddling with it, and the culmination is what you see with Standalone.
The reasons the mod got worse over time were:
1. Everyone figured out all the best places for loot, and realized there were so few of them. You could run the entire map with a Coke and a can of beans. If you die? So what, just hightail it to Stary or NWAF and get geared up again.
2. Hacking. It killed most people's interest when they would all just get Thunderdomed in about 5 minutes even if they found their nice AS50 and got it legitimately.
3. This sort of ties into point 1, but Chernarus itself. All of the other DayZ maps got so popular because the maps were so much better for it. Most of the people in our group moved to Lingor after being frustrated with the artifacts from the dead soldier bodies in Chernarus. At Lingor we realized how desolate Chernarus was. The thing about Lingor was that there was always something interesting to go to on the horizon. It could be a town, a military base, or even a race track! Most of the buildings in Lingor were enterable too, as very few of them were not. Chernarus came down to pretty much: Hit a down? Does it have a supermarket, military base, or school? Then it's not worth visiting. This is really addressed in the mod with the content added to the map, and obvious signs of more to come (the roads up north and Guba for example). Most buildings are enterable, and most of the towns whose names I didn't even bother to learn in the mod are actually interesting now. And this is even without vehicles.
4. Ghosting. This was still that never completely found a fix. Plenty of times we would build a base, have it protected with guards posted at every entrance, and then some guy just logs in right behind us and kills half of us. They started to address combat logging with the logout timeout, as well as the combat indicator, which was definitely great. I really hope they bring this back soon in DayZ, but given the bugginess of it in the mod, I can understand why it's disabled right now. This caused non-hive servers to become popular, which had their advantages, but their biggest disadvantages in my next point.
5. Many of the hive servers shut down and most of them were non-hive with stupid "features". How about 1000 helicopters? You want that? Why do we even need the zombies if everyone just flies over them in helicopters? At that point you might as well go play Wasteland (which is quite fun). Now, there were some cool mods for DayZ that actually handled this well, such as DayZ Overwatch, which basically was filled with military gear so it was more of a war scenario in the apocalypse. They embraced the "helicopters grow on trees" stuff and it worked for them. For other servers it doesn't. Part of why I love standalone as it is now is that not everyone is walking around with their AS50's everywhere. I guarantee, the weapon I died to the most was an AS50 in the mod more than anything. Now I know AS50s were removed, but you get the idea, just change that for some high-end military gun. I like stuff like the Mosins in the standalone and hope they have more guns like that. Maybe make the M4 the highest end of guns, and even then it doesn't do everything: The Mosin has longer range.
6. Zombies became less of a threat and more of a janky inconvenience. All you had to do was run through a pine tree and boom, you lost any aggro. Or if you've got a helicopter and need to get the zombies out of the way, just stand under the bladespan and shoot them. They won't go under the helicopter blades for some reason. On the flip side, it is often frustrating to deal with them as they were unfair sometimes. They would fidget around and dodge your bullets, when do zombies ever do that?! On top of that once one was on you, it would just follow you across the map, while it initially aggroed on you from 100 meters away and you were tiptoeing around. I think more people died to zombie jank than actual legitimate zombie kills. I know if I died to zombies, it was usually because they came through a wall or something, either that or I broke my legs opening a door and then was killed by them. Right now there aren't enough zombies in the standalone, something they plan to fix, but the zombies are definitely an improvement on what was in the mod. They just need to fix them going through walls and floors, which is total bullshit, and more important than making servers handle more of them.
The standalone is a major improvement on the mod, and I'm definitely enjoying it much more than I ever enjoyed the mod or any of it's derivatives.