I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one has a higher cost for no reason.
Some of the cruft is due to rebalancing as the game evolved, but some is just part of the artificial scarcity model of making many of the common cards worse than the best rare ones.
I agree, though, that MtG has a very broad and creative tree of possibilities. In the pure board game world, it is perhaps more similar to Arimaa.
I really love the feeling of seeing an interesting card in a new expansion, and thinking that it might go well with some obscure card that you remember from some obscure expansion from 15 years ago. And researching what that card actually did. It really feels like being a wizard and going to an ancient forgotten grimoire to see if you can find a use from a long-forgotten spell. I especially enjoy realizing that a card that was considered universally crappy and never saw serious use is suddenly useful.
I agree that the cards that are strictly worse than others could have been avoided. But they don't really do that much anymore (they seldom release commons that do nothing like Hill Giant or Grizzly Bear, for example). And they can still be fun in formats like Type III, or Limited as new players call it.
This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font?
http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html
Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.
Finding interesting combos among the thousands of existing MtG cards is also very fun and cannot be done in a minimalistic game with a very small number of components like Go. They are just games with different goals and scopes.
What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules, e.g. "lifelink" for "damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life". Cards with that ability existed before the word was introduced, so the word is unnecessary, it just makes the text of the cards shorter... but the constant extensions of the vocabulary make the rules harder to understand and remember. The actual rules are still mostly like in the nineties... in fact most, if not all, of the actual rule changes have been simplifications rather than complications (mana burn removed, meh). But they just like to make up unnecessary words, it's a pity.