who asks?
show me a thread with demands to release feature bloated, bugged, unpolished(not balanced) games.
Civilization V is often criticized on this forum for being so stripped of features as to not deserve the title of "Civilization", instead often being referred to as "Civilization Revolutions 2." This often plays out as a satirical allusion to the game being so simple that it could be played effectively on a console, and for a time it was often used to demean casual strategy gamers.
This complaint is in the top three most common and persistent; the other two being the AI's apparent incompetence at everything that it attempts to do, and the frustration that the 1UPT system causes when performing actions as simple as building a road or transporting an army.
Personally, I don't understand the logic that Shaefer was trying to use. Releasing a game with the bare minimum to be considered a strategy game isn't particularly good business, unless that game is otherwise perfect. After all, you would immediately alienate your consumers if you displayed an incompetence at troubleshooting a game as simple as checkers. If you are going to release a game with a lot of flaws, the game has to be dazzling- at the very least, the game has to be
more dazzling than comparable yet less buggy games.
This effect is more apparent in shooters. "Medal of Honor: Tier 1" was outright awful gameplay, and had comparable graphics to "Call of Duty: Black Ops", which had passable gameplay; COD:BO won the fight. "Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising" had great gameplay (assuming you were it's specific target audience) but had an awful game-finding system, and was unacceptably buggy- Modern Warfare 2 won based on instant gratification and ease of use.
Shaefer allowed the release of a game that was not visually impressive enough to
truly separate Civ5 from Civ4, but significantly less feature-rich, with a significantly higher number and severity of bugs and "demerits". While it is true that some games can have a daunting learning curve, Civilization is not and has never been one of them. A few playthroughs on Chieftain and even a child can get a grasp of what to do and not be
awful.
The lower difficulties are meant for newbies and casual gamers. Emperor through Sid was designed for the hardcore. So long as you stay below Emperor, you always stand a chance, and the casual gamer can have
fun-- even with the massive number of features-- because micromanaging isn't necessary. By stripping the features, Shaefer has only demonstrated that he doesn't understand his consumers desires, and may not have understood the potential that the "legacy" model provided his new goals.
If Civ5 was just a prettier version of Civ4+all expansions, with the same features and problems, it would still have invited new gamers to the series and a lot of the animosity that Firaxis & 2K have accrued could have been avoided.