And I agree with this list even if I (respectfully) believe that it undercuts the main point of the post. Those issues are not like hunger mechanics and not niche for the population of the this forum (or of reddit). Food is something for modders to deal with while surfaces and party size aren't.
I feel like you entirely missed the point of my post. My point was (in as few words as possible), the experience Larian is trying to create is their subjective opinion of what makes a good RPG, it is not yours or mine, which means that there are going to be some things which they do not budge on and nor should we expect them to. It would be helpful if they would tell us what those things were though, so we could stop with the speculation.
Some of the popular topics, probably are not niche, I imagine the camera controls are one of the ones that are not a niche complaint. Incidentally, I have had an argument with some of the senior developers of another game over the camera in the past where their response was (I am paraphrasing here), "I understand you do not like it, but we are trying to portray the game in a certain way and changing the way the camera handles would detract from the intended experience." I very much hope its not the same case here, because I am also in the, "I want the camera controls changed," camp, but if the camera controls here are not changed, I would not be surprised if they have a similar reason as this.
Complaints like 5e purity I imagine are likely to be quite niche. Whilst there is some cross over between people who play tabletop and people who play video games, the market for video games is much, much bigger than the market for tabletop games. There are individual games whose value dwarfs the entire of WoTC, the obvious one that comes to mind being minecraft for example. Whilst I evidently cannot conclusively prove that the majority of people who would play BG3 are actually going to be gamers and not players from tabletop, what we do know is that people are far more likely to post about something that they do not like than about things that they do like. This forum illustrates this very well, especially since there were at least 3 crowds with preconceived expectations of what they would get from this game before it even hit the early access. The first being the Tabletop 5e fans, the second being the BG 1 and 2 fans, the third being the DOS fans. The point being, it is very, very likely that the people who are on the forums (myself included) do not represent the average player and their wants, because only outliers look to start providing feedback to begin with.
A strong argument can also be made that the average player does not know what they want and will accept almost anything they are told is good. An excellent example of this is
this story here, but even making these arguments is ignoring the fact that the game that Larian is trying to make is obviously not driven entirely by popularity or even by feedback from a focused group, but by what they want to make.
Incidentally, I fall into all 3 camps to some extent, I still have the disks for Divine Divinity from when it first released, the same is true for Baldur's Gate and I am familiar with the D&D rules. In some cases, I feel like the game would benefit with sticking closer to the 5e rules, in others I do not. I don't believe in following traditions for the sake of it, if something can be done better, then go for the improvement.
