I'm not laying all the blame of all the shortcomings at the feet of the water dynamics. Frankly, I don't know what it takes to include it in the game. However, here is what I assume:
1) Developers are limited by the computers ability to crunch numbers quickly. The more simulation you include, the more of that capacity you use. I'm not a developer or a computer engineer so perhaps someone who knows more can educate me on this topic
2) Simulating water flow and dynamics I would think takes a lot of calculating power and therefore uses up a lot of the available capacity for simulation calculations. If anything it's opportunity lost IMO. Maybe not at launch but there are limits to what they can include. There has to be trade offs. I can't imagine they can include everything they want. If you told me everything they and the customers want is in and the things that are not in fall below the priority of water simulation - ok, but we dont know that.
3) I will submit to you that water simulation is eye candy and I get some people play these games because they like to create pretty pictures. I and others like me play these games for the management aspect and the challenge it takes to keep things running and at the same time create a really cool looking city. Don't get me wrong, I love the graphics, but if this game is simply a painting game then it gets boring real quickly.
The water dynamics - as lovely as they are - I'm assuming suck up a lot of processing power (thus limiting current or future enhancements). And although I'm sure will be really cool for the first hour you play the game, afterwords I suspect wont be noticed that much.
Again and again, you're just guessing.
Two things.
First, so far we can be pretty sure that water simulation hasn't made an impact upon the content of other management aspects of the baseline game. There is no reason to believe that, as i've explained twice before so unless you provide an understandable explanation why it would do so, please proceed.
Second, it hasn't made an impact on gameplay preformance as far as running the game smoothly is concerned. The only ones that should be slightly concerned, are those who barely meet minimum system requirements creating a massive metropolis. Then, there could perhaps be problems.
There are various parts of this game that require quite a lot of processing power. Most notable examples include (factory) smoke emission particles, traffic, simulating individual citizents(pretty obivous) and route calculations and so on.
So if water physics really threatned the CPU bottlenecking so much, so that it would be impossible to include it along with city simulation aspects of the game that developers had time to develop, and intended to create, it would not be included. That is common sense.
If anything it's opportunity lost IMO. Maybe not at launch but there are limits to what they can include
Ok so your last speculation deals with future additions to the game and possible limitation that water physics might force upon the future additions.
Now here is the point where i can honestly say I don't know. And you're making wild guesses too.
In theory at least, it could be true for the future dlcs to perhaps be limited, but that could be 10dlcs it could as well be 100 dlc's. You don't know, i don't know. Even developers can only guess how much they can add before they run into preformance issues.
One thing for certain is, that taking out features that are fundamental to the gameplay is a very uncommon practice. Especially when the game is so late in developement stages as CSL is.
