Having said all that, tolerance is a wonderful thing. Why should those who buy the personality hype not get what they desire? Well, I really would have no objection to that, at all. The problem here, though, is that the game is being ported onto a new engine. Some folks have spoken of Paradox "taking the stuff that was already there out" - but that's not really an accurate description of the situation. To "keep all that stuff in" they would need to remake it for the new engine, but time and people-power are always in short supply. Either they put the stuff in and leave other stuff out (not good!), or they spend more time and salaries adding it in (risky - this could ruin the business viability of the game), or they leave it out, maybe to build it into an expansion pack (if the game works in a business sense). Paradox seem to have chosen this last route, and overall I think they were right to do so.
This is a straw man, in fact I really don't think it's true. For example, in Hearts of Iron, HOI3 is a completely different engine from Hearts of Iron 2, but the HOI2 events can be copy-pasted into HOI3 and they work fine. In fact, in another dev diary they have said that they
have ported over a bunch of flavor events from the original game. Not everything is going to be perfectly adaptable to the new game, of course, but I don't think this would be as big a deal as you are making it sound.
As far as the time comitment goes, of course there is an opportunity cost for everything. However, from a business perspective, I think the worst thing Paradox can do is alienate loyal fans. From the many passionate debates you can see on these forums regarding the historical approach versus the free gaming approach, it is very clear that many passionate Paradox fans fall on both sides. These are people who generally like
every other aspect of Paradox's games. I guarantee they will sell more copies by spending a few man hours putting optional historical functionality in the game, thereby appeasing some of their traditional fans, then they would adding a couple more bells and whistles.
Again, as a reference for Hearts of Iron fans, there are fights about the supply system all the time on those pages. A lot of people think it generally works and is just a little quirky (I'm basically in this group), but a lot of people have come on and said they think it ruins their entire enjoyment of the game. What Paradox did there was the "smart" thing business wise: rather than side with one portion of their fans against another, they built an optional new gameplay mode where the supply system was drastically simplified. Paradox
already sells to an extreme niche market. Trust me, I know a lot of gamers, but I don't know many who get pumped up about a Victorian-era political and economic simulation. It's not a good idea to polarise and divide this niche market
even further, instead a basic effort should be made to accomodate all segments of their core fan base.