From Larian's post above, it really seems like the resist change was not because the designers felt strongly, but more that they believed their players wanted that change. Which means the vocal "I want a harder game zomg" minority got to ruin some fun builds for everyone else.
You make it sound like Larian is only taking on player feedback under some sort of duress.
The devs have stated repeatedly how helpful the beta feedback was for them in making the game what it is. They've also stated a few times I think that they want a difficult game -- not obnoxiusly hardcore, just always on the challenging side of approachable. The latter half of the game did not go that way. The reality is that, post-release, it's not a difficult game at all if you build your character with common sense.
For the sake of adding some words from the horse's mouth (no offense intended), here are a few quotes from Swen in a PC Gamer interview:
Interview published 9th July.PCG: What kind of things are you looking at in the big update?
Vincke: We basically have two types of things. We're doing hotfixes where we see problems that we can fix right away for people, and then the patch will contain some extra content. Balancing fixes.
PCG: Divinity was a Kickstarter project. Then it was also a long-running Early Access game, where people could jump in, play the beta, obviously gave you a lot of feedback. How would you rate the process of making a game with that much community involvement?
Vincke: Tough but worth it. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on you because it's a lot of people who are constantly giving you opinion, but it's worth its weight in gold and it allows you to rise above yourself as a small developer like we are. It would have been impossible for us to make the game that it is now without our community, for sure, so in that sense it's a really cool development, actually.
If you would look through the tracks of the history of the development of this game, especially on the forums there's a big beta section where you can find a lot of it. You will literally see a lot of things taking shape, and being streamlined and more focused as a result of community feedback.
It's not always the best thing for your ego, that's for sure. If you listen to them you really get, literally, a goldmine, and then it's just a question of picking the right things, because obviously there's a lot of contradiction also that you have to filter through, but it's worth it. The patience of these people is enormous.
Vincke: [...] These are gamers, right? So they can be very, let's say, vocal. If you can manage to deal with that your game becomes a lot better. The list of things that they've helped us make better is just gigantic. It's really large. We still have a list of thousands of things that we would have to do for them that we never managed to do, because again there's just so much suggestions, but it's really cool.
I get the impression Larian know what they're doing when wading through our feedback. If a change is made, I trust it's because they believed it to be a Good Thing To Do, y'know, in their own game.
