I kind of expected responses like these. Accessibility isn't removing features wholesale, it's making existing features in your game understandable through design, natural progression, etc. A game can have lots of features and still be accessible - though they shouldn't take 'over a decade' to understand (you may be using 'understand' in a different way than I'm using it but that's a different discussion). The issues you're describing are to due to production constraints & restrictions revolving around the marketing scheme. Devs spend their money on graphics & single, well-known aspects of their series that, at this point, result in diminishing returns in both cases, and are left without enough money to spend on tighter design & - you guessed it - accessibility. To compensate, they just remove what they can't get to work. I assume that's also to do with the process and order in which games are workshopped and eventually built. It's also why stories tend to fall to the wayside and video game writing is some of the worst I've ever read lol.
Anyway, these seem like unimportant or pedantic distinctions, but this fear of the 'gaming community' opening up and losing its 'hardcore' edge is just as bad as hipsters lamenting their favourite underground bands becoming popular. Maybe you don't mean it like that, but I hear arguments like this a lot and they're just counter-intuitive, misguided, and silly. It looks like Tale Worlds is making their game more easily read without sacrificing any important aspects of the game to me, anyway.