> takes away a wonderful aspect of it when you learn or hear about some new crazy aspect of it.
It might be useful to think about this in term of how many players it affects.
My opinion is that for each seasoned roguelike player who enjoys this "wonderful" aspect, there will be multiple roguelike newbies who will be discouraged by the unfriendly UX and just leave.
That encapsulates what happened in the transition from text parser (keyboard-driven) games to mouse-driven games: discoverability went up, complexity went down; the first generation of gamers lost interest and a second larger generation of gamers came into being.
I actually find the opposite to be true. I enjoyed not having a clear idea of what everything did when I was just starting out. Once I knew what I could do with most things it became annoying that I didn't have an easier interface because there wasn't potential in the complexity anymore
There's nothing saying that one should prefer wider audience to a smaller one. Ultimately, the quest of appealing to the lowest common denominator lowers a ceiling for possible enjoyment.
> My opinion is that for each seasoned roguelike player who enjoys this "wonderful" aspect, there will be multiple roguelike newbies who will be discouraged by the unfriendly UX
This is a strange viewpoint. This "wonderful" aspect of NetHack applies solely to newbies; seasoned players already know what they can do.
It might be useful to think about this in term of how many players it affects.
My opinion is that for each seasoned roguelike player who enjoys this "wonderful" aspect, there will be multiple roguelike newbies who will be discouraged by the unfriendly UX and just leave.