As a newbie I'm curious how you've even managed to catch fish large enough to fillet. I've no experience with the old fishing system but with the new one I've only managed to catch sardines, roaches and perches. All too small to fillet and so small that they'll barely sustain what food you lose in the time you spent catching and cooking them. Fishing Net only seems to be good for catching the small fish in large quantities but it gives practically no skill. Fishing Pole and Light Fishing Rod are good for skill but don't seem to get me any larger fish with the quality of tools and skill I'm fishing at. If I didn't have two more experienced friends doing a new settlement together I think I'd be starving because there's no way Fishing would feed me the way it is.
On a somewhat related note Fishing Net is great for leveling HFC because you easily get loads and loads of small fish to cook. Still does practically nothing for feeding you though.
Mechanics wise I think the new system is interesting but could use some improvements. The timer is a bit long just to get one chance to fish and you can easily get distracted waiting for fish to appear for sometimes over 2 minutes and then miss your window to catch the fish. I've also tried spearfishing but it seems either incredibly flawed or I simply have too bad quality spear and skill to do it. I managed to catch 3 fish over maybe 50 attempts and those fish were the same small ones I could've caught with a net. I'm fairly sure I hit my feet with my spear more times than I caught fish.
One major gripe I have when it comes to rods and poles is floats. Me and my friends settled on a bit of coast on a mountainside with little trees or bushes and no moss and neither do we have chicken. To find just a few twigs I have to sail to a nearby shore and by pure bad luck those twigs can quickly get eaten away by failures in fishing which makes increasing my skill even harder. Getting floats shouldn't be that hard. I also don't quite understand why we can't craft our own.
EDIT: Weirdly enough even with all this I'm enjoying fishing as an activity in the game. I just think it could be improved in many ways, especially for the newbie experience.
