Behind me is the ocean but also what we are looking at is the ocean cutting through a bank and into a plains biome before going up hill again to a forest biome
Oh, thanks for the screenshot! This is indeed a bug in the world generator, but unfortunately we cannot fix it without breaking old worlds 
Nevertheless, it's on our to-do list!
I hadn't played this game for a while, so I fired it up about three hours ago.
Thanks for your feedback! 
I spent a while figuring out how I could craft a chest (it was a basic crafting thing before if I remember correctly)
Actually we didn't change the crafting recipe for the chest. AFAIK in the early days (2014) the chest was also available at the workbench, but since then it's only craftable at the sawbench.
I actually have ideas about that, but considering how my ideas felt in deaf ears before, meh
Just because something is not implemented straight away does not mean it fell on deaf ears 
Sometimes there are good reasons why something is not implemented immediately, instead we put it on the back burner.
The crafting mechanic and everything that's related to it date back to the early days. It is our intention to rework it, but unfortunately we have no ETA for that yet.
When I came back (2 minutes later) my body was NO WHERE to be found. I lost everything. (I did quit at this point)
In singleplayer, the despawn times can be changed in the settings (see "Miscellaneous" -> "Corpse Despawn Time"). In multiplayer it can be changed in the server.properties file, as mentioned by @yahwho
The default value is set to 30 minutes (1800 seconds), but around 1 year ago, we had a much smaller default value (5 or 10 minutes). If you still have an old "config.properties" file in your game directory, there is probably still that low value set (while we may change certain default values with a new update, we usually never touch existing settings).
Alternatively you can check the "Keep Inventory" box in the settings, then you won't lose your inventory upon death 
but by the time I went empty my inventory I came back (about 3 minutes)... the damn bear's body was gone!
Npc bodies are also affected by the "Corpse despawn time" (as mentioned above), so if it's set to a very low value in your case, that may be the reason why the body was gone...
It takes too long to craft some damn storage!!!
I agree that it would be a good thing to have some sort of very basic chest / primitive chest (or maybe a "stash"), however, basically it doesn't take that long to craft a storage. Both the workbench and sawbench just require lumber. Once you have the sawbench (which requires you to cut down 3-4 trees in total, which is manageable with the starter tool), you can craft most chests with lumber (you only need iron for the metal chest).
The screenshot you've posted look like a raw text representation of the database... unfortunately you cannot really modify the database that way (changing any values there could break the database). You have to open the database file with a proper SQL editor (e.g. Navicat).
