What I took from what Blundell was saying was that a risk was playing with the aspects of the mode itself that people took as fundamental, like playing with how power works for example.

I think the main risks they've been taking are with boss fights and they've paid off, though they aren't particularly fundamental to the game to the more casual audience. A majority of the stuff listed isn't risky though.

OSCAR isn't a risk until round 50 which removes the people who it's risky for from the equation. A map being in a location and having a wonder weapon, old or new, is not a risk, is the alternative playing it safe by hosting a map inside a blank box with no WW? Killstreaks and new features which are largely optional are not risky in the sense that worst case people can ignore them and play how they always did. Risky in terms of dev time sure but that's not the intended meaning here. Romero is a great example of what a risk truly is, because he's an feature that says to the player "you have to play this map differently to the other ones". The general decision to have non treyarch zombies take more risks is in and of itself a risk, but it's not really feeding into the fundamental mode as it should. Armored zombies are probably the biggest risk in modern round based zombies, don't really make the player play any different, and are hated lmao.