I'm a developer. I'm a programmer for life and I can be very passionate about this topic. Especially when dealing with non-passionate, I'm going home at 16:00 o'clock, business as usual, fixing the bugs after the weekend, uninterested in the end-product and customer programmers.
In my experience enthusiastic programmers are going the extra mile for a perfect product, all others just want to earn money for a living.
Well, programmers are a bit different than most people, so I don't know if you can apply the same yardstick.
For me, mostly it's having a challenge or making things just right that makes me want to continue. Normally whatever your end result is has so little to do with the daily nuts and bolts that I'm not sure how much it matters. Usually if I can do things my own way then I can ensure there's interesting stuff to do and it will go smoothly, but generally I get pretty bored doing too simple of tasks even if the pay is great.Tthat's a lot of the reason I have been making a game instead of doing random crap I don't care about lately. But a lot of the best programmers are also pretty robotic about it and could slug through doing just about anything without flinching, but most people aren't quite that cerebral, and cerebral is probably the opposite of what you need for creating entertainment.
So I don't think it's mandatory to have a love of the playing part of games to be a writer I'm sure it helps, and geez what a stupid comment to make. Ultimately you can't make any entertainment without having it come from people who the end user can relate to, that I do believe. So how can you have someone like her and expect her to appeal to the old bioware fans? Certainly all her stuff makes me cringe, and most all the DA on stuff, even origins, gives me a twilight zone feeling to watch it.
She could maybe write stuff to appeal to twilight fans, but you can't appeal to everybody. I don't think you have to love every aspect of a game but for the big budget games it seems mostly you are paying to watch the 50 million bucks worth of cut scenes, so if you don't like those may as well boot up Q3: Arena and look for a space map game to join.
Like I said they could have brought out someone to talk about the cool game changes they are making for the next game version, that appeals to these fans. Or they could have flat out said they are not quite aiming for the same thing any more, like bethesda did. Instead they chose to call their old fans misogynist trolls and ignore all the complaints and les Hepler take the brunt of all the rage that caused, and take no responsibility for any of it for themselves. In short they are scumbags.