It's an interesting issue. Who gets to define what is a major criticism? What metric do we use to measure interest in an issue? I tend to see the evil path criticism as a niche one, you see it as central.
I think Vinke has been stressing evil from day one -- repeatedly asking EA players play evil, show casing his ability to play evil, commenting on how many people play the evil path time and time again. And I think he is doing so because he knows without such encouragement most people will ignore the evil path. So where you see addressing an issue that has come from the forums I see the continuation of a narrative that started before EA launched and the use of a forum topic as pretext.
I truly think there are many more D&D ruleset threads, surface discontent threads and party size threads than 'evil playthrough' threads here, on reddit and on the beamdog and obsidian forums. I guesstimate the 'surface dissatisfaction' to 'evil path dissatisfaction' at factor of 5 to 1?
I think you're ignoring or forgetting who comes to these forums. If everything I knew about the world was based on the post on the Bg3 section of these forums, I would say Solasta is probably the greatest RPG ever made and has millions of sales. I would also think Crpgs are the most popular genre of video games and that most players only care about D&D mechanics. I don't have time to give you a more detailed comment at the moment so I hope for now this will do.
