I'm on board with this. Caveat: I never really got into Rimworld (by the time I considered it, the creator's weird tirades about gender stuff put me off) but I've seen enough LPs and played enough similar games to know basically what's going on.
Dwarf Fortress has made me obnoxious about whole categories of games. Obviously this includes the colony sims, which just seem like Dwarf Fort but less. Dungeon Keeper-likes predate Dwarf Fort by a decade and are trying to do something very different, but whenever I play those games I feel like something's missing. I'm not being fair to the games I judge like this, but I'm not trying to be--I'm trying to determine how to spend my limited time on Earth.
The concluding paragraph gets at something I spend a lot of time thinking about:
[Dwarf Fortress] does not strive to be a good video game. That is simply not one of the game’s priorities. It’s a good video game seemingly by coincidence, and until the steam release, could often only be played effectively if you used community modding tools. Dwarf Fortress is a game that could only occur because the developers were not necessarily thinking about the user experience when they were making it.
On the one hand, I think accessibility is a worthwhile goal; on the other, I think devs should make precisely the weird little thing they want to make with no regard whatsoever for what The Gamers think. The nicest way I can put this is probably just to acknowledge that I'm modernist-brained and believe that the most interesting art is structured to reflect personal idiosyncrasies (not to say we should obsess over auteurs; don't get me started). I.e., I want to see what happens when people gather up the things that live rent-free in their heads and build apartments around them. We can leave it at that and not dwell on the practical usefulness of the average Steam comment.
I've also been thinking about games that serve up tightly choreographed challenges for you to solve vs. games that invite you to express yourself in some way. But I want to play the Tactics Ogre remaster before I get into all that.