Well, I think it is just different gaming psychologies. I'm drawn towards complicated games that take years to master (if you ever even really do). Stuff like Space Empires, MOO2, Galactic Civilisations, and Stars! are the digital games I've enjoyed over the years, and in paper and dice wargames, I like things like Star Fleet Battles and such that have so much documentation you could probably describe the complete assembly of a Cessna with it all. But, there is a reason why all of these games are somewhat niche: not everyone likes to play that way---and that's perfectly fine. I've known many people, very smart people, who don't give a hoot about complex games and when they sit down to play something would prefer it to be more Chess-like where the complexity is in the potential configurations and not the pre-existing breadth of rules and units.
A lot of what you see is probably just that kind of clash. Not everyone enjoys a game that needs a paragraph of tooltips on every little single thing you can click on.
That's fine, there's a huge market for them out there.
The only thing I hate is when a good game sacrifices complexity to appeal to a larger demographic. See the latest Civilisation games and MOO3 for good examples of that. Thank goodness for FreeCiv.
