DCSS feels like it's been taken over by people who've played the game too many times, steadily working to refocus the gameplay to cater to minimizing the tedium of having completed the game many times.
Hmm. The way I've heard it expressed is they want every decision the player makes to matter. In other words, the ideal to work towards is that there is never a "no-brainer" choice to make, you always have to think about every action. To me, that always seemed like a great design goal, but I never thought about it from the new player perspective. Maybe the act of learning that a choice is a no-brainer is itself a valuable process for a newer player? That's interesting to chew on.
it's not even just from the new player perspective. I've played DCSS reasonably casually on and off for like a decade and the more recent years' changes have been a bit too much for me, in terms of stripping everything down. I completely agree with the comment before yours. I liked the food "minigame", it was fun to play KoBe and chop corpses into chunks to eat, before they go bad.
it's not that it's a bad game now, or anything like that, but it does feel like some edges may have been sanded down that should have been left intact.
