I used to play a board game called 'Blood Bowl ' which was basically having fantasy characters playing a more violent version of American football (called gridiron in Australia).
Gridiron has very little support in Australia, but blood bowl did!
The problem with blood bowl was that with each update they changed the rules to be more like gridiron - and the game had less and less followers each version as Australian players walked away from the game.
Finally we got to version 4 which made the game 98% like gridiron - a game I don't like so I stopped playing the board game.
My point is that playability MUST be a game designers #1 priority, and while you make valid points I for one enjoy the game for what it is - a balanced game (if it wasn't balanced then every team would be the same) .
