If you talk to people in industry, they realize that this is making the games worse, but it's making them sell better. Just like today, just like with a movie, high sales don't come from great mechanics, but franchises or licensing. Your superhero coop game is going to do much worse if it doesn't have a license. Why do we have so many boardgames with video game licenses? Because it sells. There's way too many games in the market right now for even industry insiders to good track of most offerings. Buyers working for large internet game stores are overwhelmed.
So no, game designers are 100% understanding their task, which is to make a game that gets backed and is profitable. Cutting half the game after you told backers what you were doing is a disaster, and it's all those extra rules and extra boards that sold the game in the first place. The fact that the game is shelved after 3 plays is not a problem for them.
Exactly. My pet peeve is when a game is launched as a kickstarter and they add new game mechanics as stretch goals. If it was a good game with just the basic mechanics then why on earth would anyone want it be more complicated just because more people have funded it? And from the other angle if it is a better game with the extra rules and mechanics added then why not make that the game? It is the job of the game’s designer to make the very hard choices and tradeoffs between complexity of rules and the fun people will have with them. If they abdicate this responsibility and leave it up to “let’s see how viral our kickstarter canpaing will be” then they don’t understand their task.