The issue is that none of these recent rule changes/taking away options will sell even a single copy. Other things will push sales up including you know what. Even the casual will see dnd/from the creators of dos/the bg name and go from there. They're not gonna really pay attention to these stat changes.. so who are these changes for? Not the hardcore. Not the 'fake casual'? Casual players aren't gonna be interested a 100 hour turn based rpg to begin with. The rule changes doesn't change that. So, why changes? And, why not make them optional?
Honestly, I don't think this is accurate. A lot of the changes made by Larian are clearly meant to make the game more intuitive and easier to understand without actually knowing D&D. That's good, and important. People shouldn't need to consult forums or books to figure out why or how something works, by and large. So making changes that feel consistent and like they make sense separate from the 5e rules is 100% logical to me. It keeps people from being frustrated and encourages non-D&D knowledgeable players (and I'd definitely argue the CRPG community is larger than the D&D community, for all that there's undoubtedly overlap) to actually play the game.
