Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I'm not quite sure if it's about the one true way to play, so much as it is fear of losing something people like. Take your SC2 example: I personally quite agree that SC2 would be a better game without the focus on APM. But to someone who loves SC2 as it exists today, they probably hear that and envision a world where vanilla SC2 is replaced with a version of SC2 where it has all the unit automation. So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.
I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.
That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.
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Everybody sees the dangers of cultural appropriation once it's their culture.
In an ideal world "StarCraft 2" and "SC2 but with better AI" would just be two different game variants, and a vanilla-SC2 player wouldn't complain about the AI options any more than a blitz-chess player would complain about someone else preferring to play without any clock.
But everybody's attention is a scarce resource vied over by competitors, and in a world where network effects make it much more enjoyable to have everybody else's attention go to the same target as yours does, it's actually reasonable to worry about whether an alternative is going to stop that from happening. If you actually preferred Betamax over VHS, HD-DVD over BluRay, etc, it sucked to be you.
I thought SC2 was popular enough that nobody should need to worry about splitting the player base, though; surely both sides of any split would be able to find online matchups easily for years to come? At the very least an experienced player who eschews better AI should be able to find a game against a noob who doesn't. Maybe video game fans have just been through so many iterations of the of "Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo" fight that getting worked up about such things is a reflex now.
If you want to see these sorts of fights played out on Hard Mode, look at the worries some people have over driverless cars or vegan meat substitutes. The bailey is that driverless cars are unsafe or that vegan pseudomeats are unhealthy, and that no amount of technological improvement will ever make them good enough, but I think the (occasionally explicitly stated!) motte in each case is the risk that, once the new alternative actually is better for most people, there'll be pressure to make the traditional alternative outright illegal. Nobody's ever going to ban anyone's preferred versions of Star Trek or StarCraft, but animal rights groups or public safety groups might actually get some traction against real meat or human-error-prone cars once the main argument for them is pared down to "Freedom!"
The higher stakes version of vegan meats and driverless cars is going to be embryo selection
For a lot of people, driverless cars is high stakes.
Car culture in its various iterations is about the feeling of freedom, self-sufficiency and control that comes from driving your own vehicle, and incidentally some things that have become associated with it like the sound and feel of a petrol engine going "vroom". I am one of the Motte's resident Euroweenie car-haters, but I get this - part of the reason why I don't own a car is because I can hire the right vehicle for optimum fun each time I go on a road trip - whether that's a Ford Mustang convertible or an 8-seater crossover with one of those wonderful illegal Volkswagen diesel engines that cheat on emissions tests.
A lot of people in a lot of countries have made participating in car culture part of their identity, and Red Tribe Americans have made it part of their tribal identity.
Ubiquitous driverless cars, and particularly driverless cars that are co-ordinated by a central server (and for driverless cars to get significantly more capacity out of urban roads you need that co-ordination) give up all of that. The idea of taking a driverless car out on the open road - even if the open road in question is a moderately congested British motorway - fills me with horror, and I'm not even a proper petrolhead. And (from the point of view of a car culture participant) most of the benefit being that low-status people (kids, drunks, and the decrepit) gain undeserved mobility.
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