There have been countless bad games where players have to resort to a "probe everything" approach in order to find items which are needed to progress in the gam

There have been countless bad games where players have to resort to a "probe everything" approach in order to find items which are needed to progress in the game. But "good games" generally strike a balance between all the gameplay mechanics and that's precisely how they came to be known to be good. You wouldn't change the way mario jumps in order to reach higher places and call it "enhanced gameplay". Similarly you wouldn't show every hidden question box with a blaring icon so that you'll always know where all the secret boxes are. These two elements are defining features of the game. You don't change that. I think the current approach is to make games so approachable to "casual gaming" that anything deep loses meaning. Many old games that I consider beyond "good" wouldn't fly today. But adapting these games to a more modern hand-in-hand approach will simply destroy them.