I personally wasted like 20 minutes refafing trying to join a lobby without realizing it was downloading a new patch, and then spent around another hour downloading the new patch, leaving me with no time to play the game I was originally excited to play. It was such a frustrating experience I haven't really played since. I'm obviously not going to leave FAF because of this, but I can see less committed players quitting because of it.
It's a really bad player experience because it's not clear what's happening when you are downloading a new patch—the download progress is small and in the bottom right corner and not at all descriptive. I think it was downloading something called env.nx2 and the loading bar was not even visibly moving, so at first I assumed something was wrong.
I understand that this is a very difficult problem to tackle, and I know how much work you devs are putting in already, but I really think this should be one of the highest priority problems to tackle. For average users like me, if the actual download issues can't be solved, I think at least communicating clearly that it's downloading a new patch and that I should just sit tight and wait for it to finish would be a big improvement.