Having played HD2 since release I think the game has been focused on the player experience for at least the last half year if not longer. Yeah, they had some rough patches where they nerfed things to the point they became frustrating, but their last few big updates really did focus on changing things based on user feedback including a lot of QOL fixes (reloading!) and they changed up the overarching mission structure to break things up into more immersive objectives and subobjectives.

Can definitely understand not wanting to come back because of the history though.