My argument there was following on with the comment about forums. The more "mainstream" D&D player, the player that found D&D within the past 5-10 years, is not the type of person who is making arguments here. In fact (and I loathe generalizations, so please forgive me, but I will make a few here), they are likely the type of person who does enjoy flashy effects and not following the rules of D&D very closely. The feedback you see given on these forums, is not from these types of players, it is largely from the type of player who has been (as they will tell you) playing D&D for the past 20-30 years and has very deeply entrenched and "hardcore" views.
Gotcha. I somewhat disagree with this. As a personal anecdote, I have only played tabletop 5e (and only half of BG1, played ~5 years ago).
More broadly, if you look at the results of the forums survey
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=712680-88% of people who filled out the form played DOS1/2
-82% played DAO
-69% played BG1/2
-82% are familiar with the 5e rules
-65% played tabletop 5e.
If you assume that the survey sample represents those who post on the forum (not unreasonable), we see that
more people are on this forum are here because they've played DOS1&2 or DAO versus BG1&2, and 35% (not an insignificant amount) have NOT played 5e. So posters on this forum are
not overwhelmingly from BG1&2/old D&D purists. A majority, sure, but also take into account that these players, like me, may have only played BG1&2 in recent years after starting with 5e.
If you look at the answers of only those who are NOT familiar with 5e (assuming that these type of players are the "mainstream" audience Larian is looking for)
https://i.imgur.com/KAcSU4N.png, they still dislike e.g., surface effects, increased HP, and stealthing as a bonus action available to everyone.
tl;dr: I don't agree with your assertion that most people on this forum have been playing D&D for 20-30 years. And even if they are, there are still common arguments between "d&d purists" and "mainstream players"
