If you dont like the game that's fine but the changes to ages and civ swapping/leader choice aren't for "no apparent reason", theyre for the clear and reasonable purpose of capturing the early game feeling of exploration/stakes as a way of avoiding the mid-late game slog and algorithmic progression where you hit a certain stride that needs to be maintained with increasingly extensive/decreasingly impactful micromanagement until the end. Whether you think that was an actual problem or whether they succeeded about it you can disagree, but the rationale for the design decisions are clearly articulated.
As for there being "too many options" I really dont understand this complaint. Civ7 is nowhere near approaching the level of choice of e.g. nations or unit/building composition as other successful strategy games like paradox gsgs or total war games -- unlike in those games, theres very clear paths to specific victory conditions that are explicitly associated with yield types and tech tree paths. The changes to the overall gameplay loop, i.e. ages and civ switches, do force some high-stakes choices on the player, but I don't see how that's somehow necessarily a bad thing or in any way "overwhelming." In almost every game I've played so far, choices vary between more-optimable and sub-optimal but workable. Most choices in the game aren't even mutually exclusive (you can play a science-focused civ, culture-focused leader, and very reasonably focus on military and commercial victories instead). The ones that are mutually exclusive, i.e. civs & leaders, are not really all that different from previous games choice of civs, and because there are less choices in each category taken on its own (only more in the way of combos), I don't see how overwhelming it could be for previous fans of the series.
If anything I think a far more legitimate complaint is that there's not ENOUGH choices or customization -- not enough options for civs to transition while maintaining historically-themed immersion, not enough leaders to represent the variety of civs, not enough game rules, not enough map types, etc etc. I really don't see how anyone could be such a big fan of the civ series to hate the major gameplay changes, but feel that the number of choices is so much more overwhelming than in previous games, especially because Civ7 is particularly forgiving in letting you "correct" your former choices by reorienting your civ choice to match the strategy youve actually followed vs the one you imagined following at initial civ selection. In some ways probably TOO forgiving and choices end up feeling somewhat low stakes, because it's a question of suboptimal choice rather than an actually bad choice. But in some ways previous civ games felt tedious in that the choices you make in civ selection, strategy, choice of production and wars and diplomacy, etc., could be offset and made to feel arbitrary by very specific chokepoints that could lose you the game because you fall behind of pacing -- general wonky irrational AI, narrowly losing out on a wonder that sets back your production and yields and your overall pace, choosing to rush crucial buildings for victory instead of money to let you upgrade units and then losing a war in a way that effectively means defeat even though it's only midgame, etc. And none of these were fatal problems for me or most other big civ fans in previous games, but they were frustrating and didn't feel like fun challenges so much as arbitrary bottlenecks that minimized the impact of the fun strategic challenges.
