I have had the luxury of a quite stable game, and almost no crashes as of yet. I play as the Netherlands (United Provinces), and am playing on med/med difficulty. It is a breeze to be honest. The entirety of India was taken in about 10-15 turns. As others have mentioned, France was destroyed in a few turns (which was really a bummer, not the France I've read about).
I do like most of the new features of the game. One of the good improvements is the diplomacy system. Instead of sending a diplomat to each faction, you can make a deal with everybody without a hassle. At the beginning of the game, other factions are actually quite reasonable, especially if you give them a nice state gift like some jewels or a pretty pony. Now that I'm more powerful though, everybody kind-off hates me, even Great Britain, who have been my ally since the beginning, is regarding me with hostility.
The technology part is also quite interesting. You can really focus on warfare (land or sea), production (agricultural or industrial), and philosophy (economy or, well, philosophy). The tech trees seem quite balanced, and it takes quite a while before you researched it all.
At the beginning the battles were at most interesting, but now I researched all of the warfare advances, things are really quite exciting. It's very useful to have a balanced army, though you might suffice with 20 regiments of infantry of the line, it's far more interesting to have a few riflemen (they absolutely rock), grenadiers, cavalry, light dragoons, 24lb'er cannons (raking canister shot, I love you) and a splash of rocket artillery, all helping to support your line infantry.
I haven't had much to do with naval warfare. I tried it a few times, but I must have missed a tutorial somewhere (I skipped the Road to Independence), since the PC resolves the battles better then I can (which far from the truth on land battles). I do realize now that I haven't seen my Heavy 1st Rate Ships of the Line in action yet, so I should at least try it, even though the opposition has a less then meagre fleet at sea.
I also like the trading system in the game. Depending on the amount of neighbouring factions, and the size of your home trading port, you can have a number of trade agreements with other countries. You can gain these trading agreements through the diplomacy screen, and you actually have to plan them out quite well in order to get the most gain. There are also four specific trade regions, with each about five ports where you can let a trade ship do it's work. I found out the hard way though, that if your home port gets occupied, you lose nearly all of your trade income, which for the Netherlands, proves quite devastating.
All in all, I am really enjoying this game and it's new features. I am looking forward to crank up the difficulty in my next play through (probably the British), and see how challenging it gets, because it's going a bit too fast now. I can really recommend it, though you should be a bit careful, since there are quite a few complaints about the instability.
