There is some criticism that features have been removed to be re-added as DLC. I wonder if this is just that it is really really difficult to make a great strategy game, and putting out an imperfect title and iterating is the only way we know how.
More likely they've noticed that DLC prints money, and there's plenty of fools eager to pre-order without seeing a single review.
Of late (at least for 5 and 6; I haven't looked at this one yet) they've been using the new versions to make _major_ changes which would clearly break the old game, and then iterating via expansions.
Possibly in a parallel universe there's a Civ game that's just Civ 2 after 29 years of iteration (Civ 2 being the first one that really received universal acclaim), but that's not they way they've chosen to go (though arguably that's kinda what Freeciv is).
Going the other way, I think Battlefield 2042 has a lot of the maps from other Battlefield games. It'd be interesting to imagine a rolling release game, with both change but continuity. In some ways... That's Destiny 2! Just... A different form factor game.
They probably have some learnings about the previous iterations, but it’s not a reusable code or even a reusable requirement. This game isn’t as polished as late Civ 6, but the core is good and it’s ok to have UX and few other things catching up later.
Just one example: in Civ 7 the selection of the map is just a switch with the names of the options. In Civ 6 it evolved into a more visual component and they added more types of maps eventually.
Could they work on a better release? Maybe. Should they have done it? Absolutely unnecessary.
> there's plenty of fools eager to pre-order without seeing a single review
There are people who discover and people who follow the crowd. I often come to an empty restaurant, sit there and then people start coming. I have seen people avoiding empty restaurants as if they were plagued. Isn’t it foolish to entrust your life to reviews or others? If those who go first are fools, why their review would be important?