The problem is that BTS already exists, why do I want to play the same thing again? (Or, better put, if I did want to play it again - why not play BTS instead of buying a new XP?)
What I meant was, what else is new in this XP besides making Civ5 more like Civ4, which I thought was deliberately rejected by the designers?
It's been pointed out time and time again that there's only one (yes,
one) feature that G&K adds that BTS also added: espionage. AFAIK, Espionage wasn't cut from CiV vanilla because it wasn't good; it was cut because it wasn't something everyone enjoyed, and they wanted to focus on mechanics that have a broader appeal. Same with religion. Since so many people like it and miss it, adding it in an expansion is fine. (Also, same with random events, although obviously those haven't been added in at least as of G&K.)
Same with religion (which wasn't added in BTS like you keep insisting). It was cut because a lot of people hated CIV's religion system, for good reason. It was 2-dimensional, random, and arbitrary. So they came up with an
entirely new gameplay mechanic, which is an abstraction of the real-world concept of religion. Said mechanic resembles Civ IV's religion mechanic
in name only, which is why it's baffling everybody else on this thread that you insisted (and then re-insisted) that they just put the same, unpopular mechanic back in. Because they
didn't.
So again, it comes down to this: what's wrong with the content? You mentioned three things: espionage and religion are too similar to the way BTS added espionage and religion (let's not even get into the fact that BTS didn't add religion as you claimed), and they both added civs and wonders. Espionage was completely reworked from Civ IV, and religion isn't even mildly reminiscent of Civ IV. And again: let's seem them release an expansion without wonders or civs. We could take bets on how many minutes it would take for angry fan traffic to bring down every civ-related site on the internet. So what makes this expansion BTS 2? You just re-iterated what you said originally without adding anything or addressing all the myriad ways it was pointed out that your complaints were essentially insubstantial because their premises were terminally flawed. What's your basis? What's your complaint? What's your alternative? What's the issue? What's your alternative?
This isn't even getting into the substantiation we're still waiting for on your claims such as "there will only be 2 more months of support before the game is dropped" and the like. Is that anything more than conjecture? And if not, does the conjecture have any basis? Because going by the company's history, I'd say your outlook is questionable.