I'm not sure what a middle ground would be. With Larian's current design, it's become sort of a self-fulling prophecy, they design things to be exciting, so the things that don't look as exciting aren't used as much, and they're "justified" in their decision to make things more exciting.
That the danger of metrics that many people miss, if you are measuring something, that what you end up getting. Example I use when trying to explain this to management is if you are measuring how fast / how many service request are getting / being closed, soon you get staff focusing on just closing requests and maybe giving less good support.
WotC has falling prey to this. They look at their metrics, see very few people play level 15-20 so been focusing on low level adventure and next time they look at their metrics, because they never support level 15-20 play, see even less people playing at that level, rinse and repeat. The next big adventure they are release is now for level 1-8.
