As a designer, I disagree with most of Bibor's analysis, in that it is too simplistic and incomplete. Positive: identifies decision making as being crucial. Negative: bashes a game designer/company with little concrete argument(and presumption of more expertise?). Principles 1-4 are just too shallow unless applied in a more specific way. It's like asking what the meaning of life is. There are a hundred answers - the question itself is just too vague to be useful.
Anyway, unless we're going to write pages and pages of analysis, nevermind that there are many books on the subject of game design, I'll try and be as short as possible with what I think. Most of the complaints about Civ5 are/were about it being boring or "dumbed down". Bibor talks about decision-making and its consequences - exactly the right subject. Everyone seems to compare Civ4 and Civ5 so let's go with that. Civ4 definitely had its big consequences. These were the product of the mechanics, for better or for worse. Then what happened? Civ5 came along and is much less volatile. So much of the mechanics from Civ4 were smoothed over and made much more salient. Civ5's technical mechanics are not nearly as flawed on a design level - lessons learned, etc (Stacks of doom, binary combat, collateral damage/suicide, the slider, the whip, tile resources, Religion system interacting badly with diplomacy and not compatible with optimal play. I could go on, and each one of these deserves its own essay on which effects are poisonous to decision-making). So, with that "smoothing over", the feel of Civ5, especially on release, could be very flat for a lot of people. There are still lots and lots of decisions to make with differing levels of optimality and effect, but the results are harder to see. As an analyzing nerd, I got everything I needed to keep me busy and I got new innovations and nicer mechanics. For others, they got uniform, uninteresting turn-by-turn clicking through the game with no crazy stuff going on.
The patches have improved this for everyone. They're definitely the right direction. There is so much more early power available now - early decisions that mean big things for your civ. The ball gets rolling sooner and it's more diverse.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the AI. Probably the single biggest thing holding gameplay back. It may be at a level that a lot of people just find it hard to have fun with. I'd work on the AI myself if the game dll were opened up (not too long now, I hope). Just remember, the Civ5 AI is better, on a technical level, than the Civ4 AI. 1UPT is a lot more demanding vs a human than SoDs. Also, vanilla Civ4's AI was even worse, if you remember.