I know it's your opinion. And on some levels I agree with you. What I don't agree with is how you skew things to support your argument or how single minded you are and don't seem to look at the bigger picture sometimes. This whole Bioshock postortem thing is an example.
Being cerebral doesn't make something good, just as simplifying things isn't necessarily bad. There are plenty of games over the years that have forced the play to figure out the entire game on their own, with complicated game systems. A good example of this would be Derek Smarts space sims. Very cerebral games. I don't find these very fun or well designed.
Puzzle Quest. Simple game, just have to move the mouse and click 1 button. Game starts you out with walking you through the gameplay, eventually gets more challenging in some aspects, but really all you are doing is matching up colored squares, a child can do it.
In Bioshocks case, could the game have been better? Yes. Would it have been cool to see Bioshock have more refined RPG aspects? Yes. Is what we got better than what was in development but canned? I don't know, and neither do you. All I know is that to have deeper and more meaningful RPG aspects then a lot in the game would have to change and that might have not made Bioshock any better. Obviously they were trying to do something that just wasn't coming together near the end. I think one example of this is the train/tube system that allows you to go back and forth between other levels. It's entirely pointless in the game as it is now and probably left over from a canned game mechanic.
So whether these other game systems would have made the game better as they were at that time...I doubt it. I think they pulled it for a reason and that was because it wasn't fun and they didn't have enough time to make it all work. So no, I don't think Bioshock was "dumbed down" due to focus testing, so much as they realized the RPG game wasn't working out (not to mention marketing started advertising it as an FPS), so things got cut to get it out for shopping season 2007.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19146----------------------------------------------------
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