1 - No, people don't automatically hate new things.
Quite a bit of the negative comments about Beyond Divinity at release were about it being different than Divine Divinity. While there were certainly valid criticisms (ie with the skill system some of the skills were unnecessarily divided), much of it was overblown IMNSHO or concerned issues easily avoided or worked around. The stat system in BD allowed many more viable character builds, for example (warriors in DD pretty consistently ended up as 2 parts strength, 2 parts agility and 1 part constitution).
