The most important thing to take note, is who the game designers are.
The complete lack of awareness, the mediocrity, why people think it's the C or D team instead of the A or B team working on BE, is because it's actually true.
The original designers of Civ5 were Jon Shafer, Ed Beach, and Scott Lewis. Since Civ5, Jon Shafer has left Firaxis, Ed Beach has been switched to another Firaxis project, and I'm unaware what happened to Scott Lewis.
The designers of CivBE and RT are now Will Miller and David McDonough. You can see them on the BE Youtube channel.
People try to make the connection that Civ5 started terrible, but turned amazing. Within months significant balance patches were made. By the release of G&K, the game was clearly on the path to greatness. But that was Jon Shafer, Ed Beach, and Scott Lewis.
It has been over a year now, with the first expansion. I gave RT a long, honest, hopeful playtime. But the gameplay is just non-existent. Will and David have either not played their own game, or seriously lack any sense of awareness.
Lets look at this analytically. Make a list of things from the top of your head, that BE has changed from Civ5. Almost every single change that Will and David decided on, made the game worse. From the tech web (Which became far more confusing while simultaneously being less meaningful than Civ5 tech rushing strategies), to removal of luxuries, the wonders, the lack of specialization (flat yield buildings and lack of great people means every city is the same), the simplified economy (fresh water and forests mean nothing anymore, tile improvements mostly useless and definitely not worth teching for), and an AI changed to become extremely passive. Every single gameplay change made the game worse.
I wonder if Firaxis seriously just asked two random interns whether they "wanted to try their hand at game design", thinking talent and artform can be simply taught to anybody.
In any case, these two are the anti-midas. Everything gold they decide to change, turns it into something worse. I gave RT a long trial, and nearly everything they did was a terrible return on investment (hydracoral was pointless for all the work making it "grow and spread") or outright made the game worse. The game I feel is even worse now than at release, because their design skill is just not there.
Diplomacy 2.0 - the AI is even MORE passive, and judges friendships based on a criteria no world leader or strategist would EVER use. The AI loves the player when they're already doing good. The player gets a free, peaceful ride to the victory condition. You don't even need military units anymore because everyone loves you for "building improvements around your cities."
Not even the warmonger AI's play to win because they're too busy praising you for your "great satellite coverage", while all of them barely ever make progress towards the victory condition themselves, even on Apollo. They fall drastically behind on affinity because they can't do quests and are terrible at expeditions - nothing at all was done to make up for this even when giving them affinity boosts is trivial. The AI outright plays to lose, which shouldn't happen in a game where Montezuma used to unexpectedly wipe me out.
Salvaging artifacts, artifact buildings, hybrid affinity bonuses, diplomatic agreements, all add ridiculous economy bonuses and completely and utterly explode and trivialize the economy even more, without any changes from BE original bring the economy back in line.
Will and David, if you don't know what you're doing, then dear god, please ask someone for help. Ask them to send someone from X-Com, ask freaking Sid Meier himself for gods sake. You two are going to single-handedly sink the beloved Civilization franchise, and that is a massive shame to not only the players, but everyone else on BE who has done a great job on the art, atmosphere, and art direction. The theme itself is what is keeping you afloat. The gameplay design is where the problem is.
