Sure doesn't seem that way. 99% of the complaints I've read boil down to people upset that it's not close enough to Civ 4.
Wah, I can't see diplomacy modifiers!
Wah, religion is gone!
Wah, no slider!
I've seen this sort of thing countless times before. Popular Game comes out with a sequal, and a bunch of self-styled hardcore fans pitch a fit because it isn't just a glorified expansion pack. So they kick their feet while and scream while everyone else enjoys the new game.
Mis-characterizing the people who disagree with you as whiny, tantrum-throwing children does not make your opinion any more valid. It only serves to show how petulant you are.
Civ V is a dumbed-down version of the series, which became popular by
not being a dumbed-down game. The only innovative ideas in V are city states, the change to Hexagons and only allowing one unit per tile. Everything else is either exactly the same, or reduced to insignificance. All of the interactivity, functionality & decision making which made the previous versions of the game so enjoyable were tossed out the window, so it is perfectly understandable for the fans of a series which thrived on those principles along with managing (note:
not micro-managing) an empire to be underwhelmed.
People are not upset because it's not a re-skin of previous versions. They are upset because the foundation of what made the game great, is gone. Civ has changed from a game where you needed to manage & grow an empire into a simple war game. It's depth, which is what made the game so appealing to so many, is very weak now. Some questions or conflicts we as players used to ask/face were: Do I focus on research, or commerce? Do I give patronage to this AI so that they will like me enough to trade with them? Should I research this tech and use it to trade for another, or should I rely upon pointy-stick research? All of those choices are gone and Civ is now relegated to building structures without regard to an individual city's need and building military units for conquest. Very
slow conquest, mind you.
They don't have to replicate every feature from each previous game, but when they replace one feature with another or change how those features are implemented, the very least they could do is make the changes interactive for the player. They didn't, and that is why Civ V fails to meet people's expectations.