Less whacky stuff than in 1st edition, easier and faster combat, a well made trade and crafting system, enemies from a Bestiary that can pose a real threat, even to high level characters.
I agree with a lot of that. Even ordinary buying and selling items is a chore to do with Old World Armoury, let alone the cargo trading system, which often doesn't make sense. I've built spreadsheets to help fast track a lot of stuff. I've pretty much copied any item from OWA, and any other 2nd ed books into a list, and all I have to do is put in on one sheet the gossip, haggle score of the purchaser and seller, and city size, and it rolls dice (random funciton) and caluculates if it's available or in demand, and a buy and sale price based on haggling. And I've done something for the trading rules from The WFRP Companion as well. Plus I have a party tracking sheet, group inventory thing, earninns and expenses tracking thing, for those days when they do their careers, and the the costs of staying at inns, and food are all calculated a sum I can tell the players, os they can update their character sheet.
I play on Roll20, so I have a large number of NPCs built up there. I've built most of these things, just so I'm not wasting time in a session looking stuff up. I used to have players submit a list between sessions of anything their characters might want t o buy and pre-work it our before the session, I can now pretty much do it in real time.
I would change the way availability works, by having types of shop in a town or village having an availability rating, then whole groups of items then become available or not. Combat I don't think is too bad until you start getting large groups, including NPCs on both sides of it. i'm inclined to make it less gamey though, with the type of action, and have players describe how they are trying to fight, and then apply modifiers accordingly.
I like the D100 system, as it's really easy for new players to understand. But there comes a tipping point from most things being really difficult to becoming really easy, where PCs start becoming so much stronger than the average guard, so they get cocky, and you get former rat-catchers threatening counts, knowing they and their guards are no match to the players.
I want to see lands other than the Old World getting fleshed out. I want to see Lustria and the Orient. I want to see a book about Araby. I'm seriously going to shoot myself, if Cubicle7 will once again delve into the standard WFRP trope of beastmen in the forests and cultists, lurking in the basements, not to mention grim witch hunters. I want WFRP to evolve and not sit in the same place, in which it was sitting for the last 30 years.
WFRP will either change it's MO or die, it's that simple. Leave the core of the game's atmosphere as it is, but move forward. Please.
I think when I spoke to Cubicle 7 at Warhammer Fest, they were looking to explore those areas, and possibly different time periods as well.