I'm a bit bothered by the decrease in the number of spells per day for spell casting classes like Wizard, Druid, and Cleric. There are a couple of issues that this creates.
I've always had a big problem with once per day abilities. They mimic nothing in real life, nor do they really mimic anything in fantasy literature and other media. In real life, you get fatigued, but with a little rest, your fairly close to doing things at the level that you were before you first exerted yourself. The other issue is that you have to be hyper-strategic with those abilities and players have to meta-game to know which encounter probably needs that ability to be used to not waste it or waste a day not using it.
Spells in Pathfinder and D&D were a bit like this, but as characters advanced in level, they weren't so bad. By reducing the number of spells per day, spell casting is more like the once per day abilities.
One issue is traveling encounters vs dungeon encounters.
In dungeons, some players want to hold everything in their toolbox until they're fairly certain the they're at the final big boss final James Bond movie finale encounter. It makes some sense. That's what's going to be hard. That means that their foregoing their abilities a lot. This is especially the case at low levels. In 1st edition Pathfinder, at high levels, they could loosen up a bit because even at the finale encounter, they'd have crucial spells available. With less spell slots per day, they're never going to loosen up. They may not recognize that the big tough encounter is the one, and so even then they may never use their spells.
Players expect that while traveling there will likely be only one encounter per day, so they use everything in their toolbox for the encounter. That means that the characters shine and are more likely to do the most dramatic and climatic things during the most inconsequential encounters. It's a bit sad. A GM can try and thwart this by creating multiple per day traveling encounters, but that creates work, and delays even further getting to the end of the dungeon.
Another issue is rest. Some players, seemingly no matter how long they've played, want to deal with encounters by using everything up and then resting for the day, making for a tiny number of encounters per day. As a strategy, it makes sense too. Use everything all at once, and you should be able to beat anything that the GM is throwing at you. Random encounters may happen, but you can rest after those too and they aren't going to be as bad as main encounters. Lots of resting means lengthening game play. There will be more random encounters. Managing rest time takes time. Refreshing stats takes time. GMs can try to discourage resting by making lots of consequences, but that's not fun. Reducing the number of spells per day means that even at higher levels, players are going to want to rest even more frequently. It's not good.
I actually would have hoped that things would have gone the other direction. I would have hoped that abilities and spells refreshed over a period of time without sleeping for an 8 hour period, maybe not immediately after an encounter ended, but over less significantly than a day, so that dungeon game play would be sped up and that traveling encounters wouldn't be so different in game play from dungeon encounters. Instead, we got the opposite.
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Something that I find strange is that if adventurers are acting like that, any Big Bad Guy can make these characters burn through their spell and then could just prevent them to take rest by sending some minions every X hours before finally attacking them.
Making rests all of the time should enable the bad guys to be ready for the players.
I think they hoped buffing cantrips would help compensate for this.
The problem with the cantrip buffs is largely they 'buff' is pretty trivial. Roughly +4 or +4.5 every 4 levels, and that's with the 'good' damage cantrips.
Also, too, a cantrip is 2 of 3 actions each round. I'm not particularly convinced that 2 actions to maybe do 2d8+4 damage is a worthwhile use of time at 9th level.
As CR9 creatures go, a bone devil has 120 hp, a greater air elemental, 110 hp, greater earth 145, greater water 155, and greater fire elemental 160. So 13 average damage is just going to slowly chip away at level appropriate enemies. It's even worse in the 6-8 range when you don't have the second damage die.
Fewer spells and leaning on cantrips is how D&D handles casters and it works beautifully. One thing it does that I don't see used widely in this playtest is a method for regaining/preserving spell resources. In 5e Sorcers have spell points they can buy new slots with, Warlocks regain all casting on a short rest (as they only have a small number of spell slots + cantrips +aspected powers) and wizards can retain or return some prepared spells based on school.
I noticed a few places where there are similar mechanics, however, I didn't see them for every spellcaster.