Well, apart from Driftmoon being quite old at this point AND much too comical for many/most people, Tyranny was ripped apart much like Tides is being ripped apart.
IN FACT, every modern attempt to make an RPG that isn't absolutely 100% indie has been torn apart by the very people claiming companies stopped making games for THEM and have bitched and moaned for a couple decades. Wonder why they don't make more of them? LOL Divinity:Original Sin, Might and Magic X, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Tyranny and the 3 Shadowrun games have, at one point or another, all been torn apart by people who claim that Baldur's Gate can never be beat, and everyone ignores real RPGs.
Now, if you really think there isn't a game amongst those mentioned that even comes close to matching a Baldur's Gate, then your rose-tinted glasses are thick as fuck. Seriously, nostalgia is great and all, but if you played those games today as new games(not the updated versions by Beamdog, which also have been attacked horribly) you'd be tearing them apart as well, mark my words. At this point, the only conclusion that can be reached is, you don't want to be happy or have good RPGs made, you just want reasons to complain and be angry.
Edit: Hell, I can just see it. People angry that you can change classes at will in PS:T "It makes the choice of class meaningless if you can change it anytime!!!", not to mention all the bugs these games had on release, which time and many patches have hidden.
I'll try and answer your points as best I can.
I didn't rip apart any of the games I listed. All games will have fanboys and fanhaters, always have and always will. Some companies deliberately bait controversy as a cheap means to gain free publicity. You'll notice that game sales very rarely correspond to what opinions people have on specialised forums and it takes a specific kind of dumb to get the mass morons to start hating on a game [see Mass Effect 3 ending, for example].
The only game I've been motivated to play and got the opportunity to review here recently was Serpents in the Staglands, a game which very closely matched my tastes, but even that had a fair few on the codex berate me for giving it 4 out 5. However, I don't view criticism as hate. That's where you're taking everything way too personally. Someone else's view that the game should be a 3 out of 5 at best, and for logical reasons they give, is as equally honest and understandable as me giving it 4 out of 5 with my own set of logical reasons. An independent observer is then free to decide which aspects of those opinions ring more true
to them.
The reason why the Infinity Engine games are still revered and unchallenged for their niche is many-fold and mostly obvious, just as why every RPG since has not been able to match their ubiquity. Here are the bigger, more obvious, points:
1. The IE games were dedicated PC games. Single player PC games. They were also the AAA of their day and required large teams of developers with a huge (for then) budget.
From 2002 the investment money started moving to different niches, notably on-line multiplayer and MMOs, due to the WoW effect, and towards the console market due to Microsoft (the main driver of PC gaming) releasing the xbox (march 2002).
So the IE games, unwittingly, became the last batch of dedicated PC single player games with a AAA budget.
2. The mechanics of micromanagement.
The IE games depended heavily on micromanagement as the method to play them. There was no story mode, no quest markers, no streamlining generally. If you wanted to play well you had to take a deep interest in the rules of the game and manage your game skills at every opportunity. Consoles, on the other hand, tend to promote twitch gameplay where it's more about your personal hand-eye co-ordination than fiddling about in sub-menus.
3. Dungeons and Dragons.
They were the last [fully competent] games to be released using the dungeons and dragons rule set. There were a few others here and there after, such as Neverwinter nights (which was more about the toolset than the single player campaign), Temple of Elemental Evil (which was released in a buggy and unfinished state) and Knights of the chalice (a micro-budget independent game), but the IE games were the last in a long line (going back to the 1980s) of D&D and D&D-like PC single player games.
As you can see, this list is getting long already, and I've only just touched the surface, the tip of the iceburg.
So the gap in the market has been, for 10 years, from 2003 to 2012, just a dedicated single player PC cRPG with a decent budget. There have been a few decent attempts in that time, such as the German Drakensang rule set games, but for their best game, the River of Time, they didn't translate it to English for years, so it didn't even have a chance.
With the arrival of kickstarter, the niche could be filled and, since 2012 lots of excellent cRPGs have flowed through the system. But the same problem keeps emerging, that as soon as someone applies a decent budget to a game then people start amending the game to focus more on multiplayer and consoles, which is not what the aforementioned niche is looking for. Pillars of Eternity was an excellent attempt at the niche, but it was very much a first attempt and, don't forget, even today, Baldur's Gate 1 has a worse reputation than Baldur's Gate 2. But if people don't point out what things they're interested in via visible criticism, how would a developer ever know what to implement in order to attract that niche.
You are right that whatever gets made will face criticism, because that's always been the case. Rose tinted glasses don't claim that every game of the past was better, what they do is permit us to remember the good stuff from the past and forget the rubbish. They give selective memory. By applying selective memory one can, hopefully, build on the shoulders of giants and perpetually improve a product (see cars, aeroplanes, virtual reality etc etc). It is, ironically, far more damaging to the hobby in the long term if all you do is praise whatever comes to the fore, because it allows bad designs to perpetuate unhindered. A silent niche might as well not exist, because no-one knows they exist, so wont ever cater to them and games will just drift ever further from their preferences.
Your entire rhetoric is unhelpful, repressive and dictatorial, not to mention hyperbolic and blasé. You're the proverbial dog howling at the moon who can't differentiate the difference between legitimate concern and drooling hatred.
But I think you know all this.
I think you just enjoy strutting your stuff. If this wasn't the case then your post might have actually talked about the games rather than simply making personal attacks on other posters. It was a good
rant though, I hope its helped relieve whatever tension you are currently needing to release.
