I am currently playing XCOM 2 on Commander Ironman, so I wanted to share my thoughts as well. I like the game very much and I would give it 9/10 right away as I am not experiencing any issues. Maybe I am lucky though.
I like the fast paced combat and timers as well and I haven't found it less tactical. Maybe it would make more sense with the mod True Concealment where the timer starts after concealment wears off because sometimes I was missing 1-2 turns. Once it happened to me that I didn't make it to the computer with a hacker in time, because it was on the second floor and it was not possible to get there by climbing, only by stairs. On another mission some of my troops haven't reached the evauation area in time and were captured, which is btw very good feature as well. You have to free them later on. Despite these failures, I continue just fine.
What I would like to see in Xenonauts 2 is the possibility to get soldier/engineer/scientist from an event. There were events in Xenonauts 1 like sunken ship or bombardments, it would make sense to have a rescue mission event after to get random outcome.
