Starbound

[PatientZero]

If you have enough materials to make a Platinum Pickaxe, for example, why should you have to backtrack all the way to a Copper Pickaxe and climb up the tiers just to make it?

Couple of reasons I can see, first it just stops things like copper being redundant (aside from using it to repair), and it better controls the progression, in the sense that you're "supposed" to have the lower tier pick before you get the next one.
I'll grant you it's a bit of a knee-capping solution, but it does prevent say, having enough diamond to make a pick and then having no use for platinum until you get the armour blueprint.

I dislike that you can only see your hunger bar at milestones of getting hungry, or eating something. It should be displayed when you're looking at your inventory/character page.

Press Alt, I'd prefer there to be some kind of page to show you your hunger and temperature, maybe alongside other stats and details, but again blah blah blah beta.

Regarding holding shift, I can't help but feel it should be the other way around, where holding shift let's you build/mine/etc. clusters of four, and by default it's one.

In general you'll spend a lot more time mining and digging around large areas of dirt and rock than you will building, particularly with blocks, can you imagine how annoying it would be having to hold down shift all the time?
If there were some kind of toggle for it, now that I could get behind, but in general I'd much rather have the faster way of digging be the default.

The game is still in early beta, but that doesn't exempt it from heavy criticism. It needs all it can get in this phase.

Totally agreed, but complaints about things like keybindings and general usability need to be tempered with the fact that pretty much everything is subject to change right now, a lot of the things that need changing or fixing are pretty low priority.