Yeah. I remember when this game offered a few occasional Grand Thrill Rides to the unskilled.
I've seen this happen before with other games that are regular patched/updated/expanded. A philosophical debate starts up about how much luck/ease-of-use is appropriate and how much skill is appropriate. More often than not, the "skill" crowd slowly wins out over time, usually to the detriment of the game's original design.
I understand the idea and the appeal behind making a game into a chess-like match where only TRUE BRO PROS win. But luck is important to a game designer, because it sometimes allows idiots to live the dream. Skill players find this immensely frustrating because for them it's all about who "deserves" to win.
The main problem happens when you realize that the most skilled players of ANY game will always form only a small percentage of the player base. Those rare moments of glory are what sustain a huge portion of a player base's interest.
It's anecdotal as fuck, but I know quite a few game designers and have been involved in my fair share of design consulting. Let me tell you, the smartest game designers hate skilled players like nothing else. Not because skilled players break systems (they do and it's annoying, but this is expected and normal), but because skilled players bitch like nobody business (it's much harder to rebut a world champ's encyclopedic arguments than some grammar-free bonehead's blather, and the OBSESSED crowd has a longevity most casuals can't remotely match) and have a rock solid assumption that that play skill = design skill. Eventually, these people eventually wear the designers down (or even replace them) and the game goes in the crapper.
For my money, I prefer to have a fair dash of luck or ease-of-use in my games, for a bit of a different reason: Life is unfair. Frequently. To me, the mark of the most skilled player is not just winning in a mythical 'perfectly balanced' construct, but in shit situations where everything has gone pear-shaped on you. Sometimes you do it with pure skill, sometimes you get a little luck of your own at the last crucial minute, but either way
it is glorious.
Stuff.