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I'd agree with it being a communication issue, and I think part of it boils down to people who see gameplay skill as.... well, a skill, and an important part of a game. Having a "just as valid no combat" mode takes away from that in a way that a cheat code doesn't.
Let's look at ME3 itself for a moment. To get the best(?) ending, you need to have a high enough War Readiness score. You need to work for that, by making the right decisions (even with guides existing, that could still be considered "putting in effort"). And mods or cheat codes to increase War Readiness to max would, I feel, be accepted by the fans in a way that having Hackett say right before the final quest, "Shepard, your War Readiness is a bit low, but we have reserves that can bring them to max and give your story the conclusion it deserves".
The original context of the Hepler discussion was an interview she did in 2006. Note that this was back when BioWare was unquestionably good, so there isn't much chance that she ruined the games back then. Anyway, here is the relevant part:
I have two conflicting feelings on this.
The first is - okay, fair enough, most RPGs are massive time-sinks, and if you have to play them because part of your job is knowing what the competition are doing, you'd want a way to go through that more quickly. That's completely reasonable. Heaven knows that I've skipped past combat in games to get to more of the writing before. (A hopefully uncontroversial example - does anybody play, say, the last third of Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines without using cheats to skip the combat?) Given that her job was game writing and she didn't have endless time, I understand the frustration.
The second feeling, though, is that she probably shouldn't be a video games writer at all. Writing and playing should not be treated as separate; rather, in a well-made video game, they need to support each other. In a good video game, the writing contextualises play, and the play contextualises the story, and they reinforce each other. Yes, I cheat through the last third of Bloodlines, but the fact that I do that is evidence that Bloodlines is a poorly-designed game. (To be fair it was rushed out and probably unfinished; the combat-heavy final act is garbage, but the low-combat first half of the game is excellent.) If I were hiring a writer for my game company, I would absolutely want the writer to understand and appreciate the gameplay. That's part of the writer's job. Gameplay can cause or intensify emotional reactions!
Hepler kind of has a point, especially for games that have terrible combat or a lot of grinding, and in 2006 I think it's fair to say that most RPGs had pretty lousy combat. But she can only have a point at all because of a larger design failure.
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