Before anyone blames Jon or Firaxis for that attitude, they need to examine their own habits. Games are the feature bloated messes they are because that is what gamers ask for.
A lot of people claim to care only about gameplay, and don't mind sup-par graphics, and don't mind a limited feature set if they are all functional and balanced. And maybe people do care about those things...
But most people BUY games based on how many shiny bells and whistles a game promises on its box or they hear about in reviews. They want more more more, not better better better. Even the best designers generally release games these days that have many more features than make sense, so they are unbalanced buggy, and have horrible AI (the more things there are to do the harder time the AI has). We have all seen so many games with 200 75% completed and 10% balanced features, when 100 100% completed and 75% balanced features would make for a much better product.
Paradox screws this up, Stardock screws this up, Creative Assembly screws this up, Firaxis screws this up. All of them do. They end up with worse games but higher initial sales, and since they are businesses and businesses are under a lot of pressure to focus on the short term, they are rewarded for this behavior.
I honestly would pay $200 for a Civ game with half the features, but balanced and thought out perfectly, but I am a tiny portion of the video game market so I don't matter.
Most buyers want spies, or nukes, or death robots, or the ability to trade technologies, or the option to raise and lower spending as frequently as they like, or 15 other things, and they just look for the sparkly shiny things they like and don't think about how it all hangs together until after they have bought it and played it. Then they feel betrayed and pissed off even though they never really valued a playable good game in the first place. Even game reviewers tend to do this, both because they are not good at their jobs and because they are in the industry's pocket.
Anyway some designers I have met would love to make better games, but people are not interested in paying for these games, they would much rather buy half broken monstrosities with huge marketing budgets that never get fully patched.