Hey Dazza,
It looks pretty cool from what I've seen so far, but there are no official servers that I can find within AU/NZ. The unofficial ones at the moment are either 0 players or overcrowded to the point that official servers seem lag-free comparatively
I think most people not liking the mod has more to do with the principle behind releasing paid DLC while in early access - especially if the base game has some pretty nasty bugs like Ark does. The other side to that is the people who don't want it to affect vanilla Ark, since new DLC owners can bring back tames & items, or they don't like straying from Dinos in to fantasy.
The start is *hard* though, with the environment killing you just as if not more often than the animals. I'm sure it will become more of a trivial annoyance later in the game, but the difficulty is kinda refreshing.
I haven't played much of it so far, and honestly wish they brought more of this stuff to the base game, but I like it for what it is. I am kinda worried about how much more this is going to dilute the player base though.