Things are not “going beyond the pale”, the core focus is still on recreating WWII. If you don’t have any DLC, guess what you get: historical focus trees. If you check mark that little box saying “Historical Mode” at game start, guess what you get: historical actions. The addition of AH paths is not going to destroy the game.
As for the focuses going off the rails, yeah, that’s been addressed and the action taken was to make sure you could pick how things played out. If you leave things up to chance, you’re accepting that the world can crash and burn as everyone loses their collective minds.
Yeah, no. The core focus is most definately not on recreating WW2, and you certainly don't get anything like historical actions with historical focuses active. Historical focuses don't prevent the game from moving off the rails very quickly, regardless of how closely you keep to it. The game is a grand strategy game placed in the 1930s and 40s, but it is not a game that tries or even allows to somewhat recreate WW2 unless you play a massive multiplayer game where you basically cut out the AI as a factor. While what is in there can be fun as well, it is lightyears away from modeling WW2 the way its three predecessors have. If the focus was actually on creating an interesting WW2-experience, they would try to get that stuff to run properly, e.g. get North Africa to have a proper impact and see realistic combat, don't have the AI suicide its army by sending it by sea to the weirdest places, have the AI at least try to work with all the techs that are actually in the game instead of swarming everyone with tons of infantry, or line up different realistic alternate outcomes so that they feel like a natural development. Instead there are plenty of completely wild ahistorical paths in there, which often contradict each other or sabotage the NFs of other countries. HoI always relied on the idea of "what if some things had been done a bit differently?", but none of that is to be found here. Instead it's "do whatever weird and nonsensical idea you can come up with". And that's what mods are for, not the core-game. Both for going much further in-depth, and going wildly ahistoric.
The whole problem gets even bigger when you consider that parts of the game are completely seperated from each other. The AI does one thing with its focuses, something else with its building and something different again with its diplomacy. There simply is no connection there, and it hasn't improved at any point. You shouldn't have core elements of the game contradict each other, but that is exactly what happens in the game, because the focuses have nothing to do with what is actually happening in the game itself.
For every move that actually helps with the WW2-feeling (e.g. the unit-names, some decision-paths that have been added) there is another one that pushes the game further away from modeling that war properly. It's nice to get a rework of the naval area, because that was completely broken, and allowing users to customize the game-options is a good addition as well, but there is no reason for changes that ignore what actually happened during the war (you know, that stuff didn't just drop from the sky) in favour of something that had nothing to do with it. On this particular matter, the borders that existed before were useful, because they portrayed a state that actually existed and would have remained intact if the war had ended in favour of the Axis. They also allow to represent agreement that were made during the war, like the Molotov-Ribbentrop-pact, which is essential when dealing with a WW2-game. It makes no sense to replace that with borders that didn't come to exist in parts for decades. What should have been done, is to take a look at how to allow for the most options to work out well. E.g. have the borders that existed before the war, during the war and right after the war. This means that cutting East Prussia in half to allow for the historic post-war split is a good change, but changing the Balkans in a way that allows for the release of nations that didn't exist until Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s in favour of representing what happened during the war is not. Neither is cutting east German and Polish states in such a way that you can properly model the borders of the old German Empire at the cost of the borders that existed during the war.
When you prevent Bulgaria from taking the land it actually took during the war, just so you can release a nation that didn't exist until modern times, then you are not focusing on recreating WW2, you do the very opposite.
