Compromises to something like technology and presentation without option to toggle are not fair as they dismiss a portion of your paid customers who may have bought the product influenced by those now reduced factors. You're righting in saying "the game was downgraded" is not an objective statement when the game has partially been upgraded. But that's the point; it's obviously a spectrum of components, and while one part has been arguably upgraded (arguably as in I personally don't know the framerate boost), another part has been downgraded. It's measurable.
And that same spectrum applies to your customers and potential customers. Not everybody who paid for the game is going to give a shit about framerate, even if some do enough to endorse downgrading presentation for performance. Both parties are ideally pandered to, but stuff like this due to the lack of option toggle panders to only one group at the cost of the other. That is why the compromise is not fair; it asks a group who may have bought the product for reasons specifically tied to exactly what was compromised (notability of downgrade aside) to suck it up for the other group who didn't give a shit in the first place.
Imagine this argument was the other way around; Rockstar patched in a longer draw distance, improved shadow rendering, and a few other bells and whistles at the cost of framerate. While yes an argument can be made that framerate is objectively more important to gameplay, not everybody who bought the game is going to give a shit and instead finds the framerate perfectly playable. Yet you'd still have a group upset that technology and graphics were buffed at the compromise of performance. And they'd be just as right to be upset that the product they paid money for has been downgraded in an area they find important.
Its not true that 'the other group' didn't give a shit in the first place. For one, many people will have bought the game without having read a Digital Foundry article on the game or hearing about the framerate drops. Two, its possible that even if you did know, you might still buy it because you can live with it. I certainly don't reject every single game just because it has one thing I might not like about it.
I get your point that some people may have bought this for the things that got downgraded, but c'mon, lets step back from the ideal of the argument and ask ourselves - how many people were pushed over the edge into buying specifically because of these things? I cant imagine its anything but a seriously, seriously tiny minority. So I'm not really buying that argument. I mean, nobody really noticed this stuff til it was pointed out. The downgrades, at least. Was it
really that important to everyone? I'm not saying it would have remained forever unnoticeable, but we're not talking about a drastic cutback that suddenly makes the game look bad or else other people would have noticed it already.
And obviously there would be a point where this sort of thing would be a bit crappy. But its a pretty grey area to me. Not necessarily perfectly right, not necessarily completely wrong. I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt that everybody upset by this are doing it out of some well thought out aversion to the principles you've outlined here, but I seriously think much of it is just because the reaction to the term 'downgrade' nowadays results in almost instantaneous backlash.
And I do agree options would be best.
