I wanted to give this a chance, but the truth is, the "Choose Your Starting Era" screen hasn't grown on me. Over time, it's simply become more annoying. It's interesting to read through the era text once, but after that, it becomes tedious, not to mention painfully slow. I am sick to death of watching that era icon drag across the screen. I have gotten to the point where I will purposefully circumvent the era chooser when starting a new game by clicking "Load" and then "Back", which drops me to the normal bookmark selection tool.
Think about that. A UI change is being purposefully circumvented because of how annoying it is.
I understand a lot of work went into this, and I understand the motivation behind it, but the era chooser has not helped. If anything, it's made me less likely to pick anything but the earliest start date, because I want nothing to do with the delay. So far, the most successful attempt to get me to play in alternative starting dates are the achievements - I'm particularly likely to explore those other dates if an achievement needs to be started later.
So my request is this:
Please please please please please remove the "Choose Your Starting Era" screen. Or at least give us an option to disable it, even if we have to change a .ini file to do so. I would be willing to be that if you posted a poll, at least 70% of people would express a strong dislike of this feature, with less than 1 in 10 actually liking it. cannot express how much this screen annoys me.