Some people like(d) DCSS because it was a complicated system with lots of entropy that sort of gave an illusion of complicated decisions. A lot of recent design

Some people like(d) DCSS because it was a complicated system with lots of entropy that sort of gave an illusion of complicated decisions. A lot of recent design decisions have been around removing decisions that aren't really that interesting if you know what you're doing. There's merit to both views. I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. The biggest change recently was removing food. On one hand, I've never finished the game without a huge surplus of rations. Food did not affect the game, almost ever, even for trolls and spriggans so long as you were not overly cautious about eating food when needed. Once you understood this, food didn't really serve any purpose in the game for 99.9% of game time. On the other hand, newbies might think its interesting, and overindex on, say, spellcasting to reduce hunger costs and hoarding rations and think its a fun added challenge.