Currently clocked in at 4.5 hours here.
Strangely enough, the game seems to stutter on the one of the early boss encounters, the tree sentinel (he's the big armored dude riding a horse you've seen from network test videos and trailers). The game stutters whenever the sentinel is doing a big attack. It messes with my timing as the frame rate keeps fluctuating, leading to my death. Otherwise, the game runs at perfect 60 fps for me. It's so weird because I have just beaten Margit, another tough boss with several big attacks, and there was no stutter there.
The controller issue was easy enough to fix; Settings -> Controller -> General Controller Setting -> And checking on/off for the controllers. From here, you can simply choose to exit out then reconnect the controller and restart the game. I am using XB1 Elite Controller, and decided to take one step further, and checked out "Xbox Extended Feature Support", which requires a system restart. Taking this extra step seemed to have made the controller work.
I honestly think the launch status of this scale is tolerable. We've seen WORSE launches. Compared to launch disasters of the past, this game at the very least isn't broken at the fundamental level and its mechanics working.
Looking past the launch issues, I can say for certain this is probably the most ACCESSIBLE souls game. It's still balls-breaking hard, but this game IMO made two changes that makes it more accessible to first-timers compared to other soulsborne games.
First, the exploration is a lot safer. I haven't encountered any areas where you take damage from falling. Unless it is a 100% pitfall, I found myself landing safely from any height. Also, because the overworld is pretty big, and groups of mobs are scattered, you can explore any part of the map without any risk of triggering them. Normally I would loath open-world design, but this overworld is perfect in its size and activity. Not excessively big map nor the repeated activities within each region (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed!). There are dungeons that revert back to the traditional exploration of the past Dark Souls games, but thanks to the ability to jump and no fall damage, they are easy to explore.
Second, the spirit summons does make fights easier. Remember how I said I beat Margit? Yeah, that took several attempts. But the lone wolf spirits helped by making the boss target them, and I hit him from the side. Following the tradition of the series, if you summon an NPC or another player the boss becomes harder with higher HP and maybe damage resistance. But your spirit summons count as an item (replenishes after reaching the next sight of grace), and you use them over and over again. I can totally see a lot more people solo-ing each boss by abusing the crap out of the spirit system.
Overall, although I understand why people are upset and they have the right to do so, I think they are making way too big of a deal out of the launch issues.