How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[vetch]

Something I once saw a person say was (paraphrasing) that the reason we have homogenization and simplification and all the other stuff people now complain about is because of people asking for it. It may not have been all at once, it may not have been a majority, it may have been without realizing the now-obvious outcome...but people asked for things. And what we have now is the result of SE trying to give people what they asked for or come up with solutions to what people said were problems.

The "law of unintended consequences"/"be careful what you wish for"/"corrupt a wish".

It's all-too tempting in situations where you have no control to think, "oh, something I did must have caused this," because in so doing it creates the comforting illusion that you did and do have some control over the situation. Re-framing suffering as a consequence is a balm for frustration; it supposes that if we act differently, we won't have to suffer. It gives a perceived course of action to take to prevent future suffering (in this case, I suppose it would be arguing with the people giving the feedback we don't like). But in reality, we never had that power.

The reason that we have the game that we have is because CBU3 chose to make the game this way. We can't blame players for giving feedback, not even ill-considered, knee-jerk, and wrong feedback, when it's the developer's job as a professional video game studio to study and understand what makes games fun and prioritize that.

CBU3 doesn't do that. 'Fun' as a priority is a long way down the list. It's been subordinated to things like 'keeping expenses down' and 'maintaining the production pipeline'.