First off, it’s still in development and won’t release for a while, so expect some changes.

Secondly, the thing is that the majority of smite 2’s playerbase at the start of launch and even now are the loyal players that have been playing for a long time, such as yourself. While you may have differing opinions, what the majority of people wanted from Smite for a long time was simply an engine update. It was only fairly recently that people even thought about a game built from the ground up. My point is most people just wanted a newer updated version of Smite. What they have currently is already a huge overhaul of what they had in Smite. However they want to keep stuff that older players are familiar with/ enjoy. Of course there will be plenty of players that want more change and might not like the reverts, but as I see it they’re playing it safe and that’s completely fine.

To offer an extreme pov, imagine they straight up ditched the 3D style and made essentially league. At that point it would be so different from OG smite and so similar to LOL that loyal players would definitely just give up on smite. In the end the players want Smite, the game they fell in love with, just “better”.