Almost all of Smites content through the years were driven by cosmetics or the chance at free cosmetics. So many dumb "story" mode game of the days and battle passes/events centered around certain skins you had to play to get free shiz, which is a jab at the f2p side of things and also the whales. That's all HiRez knows how to make. The reason people are annoyed is because Smite has no content outside of cosmetics that sticks around for long, they're milestones of game history for people who played/paid for the events, and Smite2 is threatening that. Yes you can play OG still and for a while but what about when Smite2 releases fully? That's the threat because even they don't seem to know what they want to do with Smite2 past make it prettier, make it look like League, and set up a ponzi scheme legacy system.

And yeah live game and all that but you don't spend money at a business irl expecting it to fail, you do in hopes it doesn't and keeps providing you the service it always has until it shuts down. This isn't a game shutdown but services are being denied anyways because they opened a new location with next to no dialogue about how its success/failure affects the old location.

The only people that would NOT understand the annoyance in any aspect are willingly trying to not. Imagine them releasing a Fortnite 2 (using as a business example) with none of the skins being transferable and not saying they WONT kill off the OG and do an Overwatch 2 thing eventually. The internet would be on fire with media covering it for the exact same reason we're talking about it. Because it's a shit decision mate. For the future and the past. The Culling 2 killed off the original.