Behavioral trees are not bad by definition. But different tools fit better different problems.
A classic example I could give you is the really old classic Shogun total War.
The battle tactics of the AI were governed by different sets of techniques, from the upper level, to the botton one.
At the top level, the AI was given a set of goals and very straight forward way to fulfill them, in the shape of very general directives. Then they codded for an intermediate level something which is, if I recall correctly, an expert system (a set of coded rules not very dissimilar from behavioral trees). These rules, were, a translation to game states of the principles of the art of war of Sun Tzu (these rules applied to armies and groups). At a lower level, they used pre trained Neural Networks, to model individual unit behaviors.
When they latter added complex diplomacy systems, these were handled with a Monte Carlo optimization techniques, which latter were changed to more complex algorithms capable of handle multiple and contradictory goals.
This does not mean Civ needs to use the same state of the art AI techniques. But is obvious in my opinion that some problems, like path finding, should use some optimization techniques with information not necessarily available to the player.
There are different approaches to AI, some more based on problem solving (building optimization, pathfinding, combat), and some more based on roleplaying, using specific civilization goals (diplomacy). Fxs, kind of dropped the ball, in all those systems in my opinion. Some to make easier to add more civs to the game, so they only needed to change some thresholds to code the personality of each civ.
Except this is not necessarily the case, and psychological effects are not that simple. People can love the Civ franchise and not love a particular iteration of the game. Or can love the game concept but not the execution. In particular, I am harsh at this game, because I love this franchise, and because of that (also my fault) I kept giving Fxs money with every expansion, and continued convincing myself I enjoyed the game much more than I really did. Differences aside, you can look at the new Star Wars movies as an extreme example. People are not mad at those movies because they secretly love them. They are mad, because they love the franchise, and movie after movie the final product was getting worse and worse, and still many were in denial, to the point many people took 3 movies to realize the entire new trilogy was really bad.
The OP implied that every heavily criticized game, is in reality a very good one that people loves. Which is obviously not the case. People invest a lot of time being harsh at games, simply because they expected or wanted better. The money spent in a game alone can easily explain why some people feel invested in a game they don’t like, also expectations play an important role. Emotional attachment can come from a lot of different sources, and is easy to explain why people feel the need to spend time trashing on a game, without assuming that they actually love it.
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