I'm saying that it's easy to forget that there's a whole team at Firaxis that deserves credit; there wasn't just one guy working on G&K, or even just one guy working on its design. But I guess the corollary of that is that when people say Shafer's design was bad, they should probably remember that Ed Beach was a part of that team too, and that design was even less likely the product of a single mind. When you say "Ed is clearly trying to return to the game what was stripped by Shafer", it's probably more accurate to parse that as "the design team of Ed Beach, Scott Lewis and Anton Strenger (G&K) is clearly trying to return to the game what was stripped by Ed Beach, Scott Lewis and Jon Shafer (Vanilla)". It would be a stretch to suggest, as your post might, that the godlike G&K design team is the yin to the satanic Vanilla design team's yang, seeing as 2/3 of the people on those teams were exactly the same. With Dennis Shirk being in the same position for both too. Of course, the lead designer is the most important role, and I'm not saying Ed Beach hasn't brought something new to that role. Rather, I'm of the opinion that the differences might have more to do with factors other than the personnel involved (e.g. more time, more to work with), and that it's easy to overplay the significance of one person, when the game was made by a whole team.