/vr/ - Retro Games

So I'm playing through Aetherius and it's giving me a whole lot of really fucking conflicting feelings.
The amount of work that's gone into this is fucking amazing. This is truly crazy, there's custom graphics, voice acting, commissioned art, unique sprites, a amount of coding dedicated to unique magic systems must have been crazy.
It is the least fun piece of shit I have ever had the pleasure of going through.
But then it got me thinking. There's all sorts of other super-overproduced bullshit in the community that looks fantastic but plays like absolute garbage, like Blade of Agony.

What causes it, /vr/?
What causes the huge dropoff in quality that production values bring?
What is it that makes smaller, simpler projects more fun to play through, like BURL TUMD or Dakka?
Why do normies suck the dick of such overproduced garbage?