To be fair, I find it hard to get upset at elitists when the genre has been continuously dumbed down in the name of "accessibility."
I don't think most people realize how different the genre is, because the vast majority never played the originals. And in their defense, many originals are now locked behind some antiquated design decisions, graphics, difficulty, etc. I recently replayed Bard's Tale, for example, and you literally had to -remember- your spells [4 letter codes]. So when you leveled up and learned 3 more spells, you had to remember DRBR [Dragon's Breath], etc. There was no menu to select from... you just typed it. As a kid, that felt -amazing-. But who is going to bother with that now? And who is going to even survive the first 5 minutes when that game is so frickin' hard right out the guild door?
A simple, easy, go-to example is map making. Many old CRPGs required intense mapmaking on graph paper. There were a plethora of traps meant to make this difficult - teleportation, spinner, darkness, secret doors, pits, etc.
Now, with a few excpetions [a special mode in Grimrock, for example], dungeons have automapping. Many see this as a great feature, because many have no interest in sitting down with graph paper.
But this leaves the original fans behind... their favorite genre simply disappears. And instead, we get something like Dragon Age Origins... not only does it have simplistic dungeons, but they're essentially just linear paths with a couple side areas... there is no point in making the dungeon complex, because between automapping and quest arrows there is no complexity. The time spent mapmaking is replaced with traversal time. You're just following the arrow for 3 minutes.
There's a lot of areas where this sort of thing has happened, and RPGs are probably the worst hit genre. Sure, now almost -everything- has skill trees and/or lewt, so gets classified as a rpg-hybrid, but until the recent kickstarter renaissance actual rpgs that the original fans of the genre liked were few and far between.
Coming from the era of Wizardry and Ultima and Wasteland, it's -is- hard. People call it elitism, but it's not that at all. It's not that I care that games have spread out and pulled in RPG-lite systems -- I -love- that this happened, I love that games like Horizon pull in skill trees and lewt. But I miss that many aspects that I loved in the RPG genre are effectively dead and buried. Even most drpgs automap, which is a wild thought to my younger self.
No other genre really has this issue. Maybe platformers have lost the idea of 'pixel perfect' jumping? [and as someone who couldn't understand the appeal, I'm thankful for that].. but if there are any fans of those, they simply lost their favorite thing. But in general? Most things lost happen due to 'accessibility', and I think RPGs lost the most in that transition to popularity.
ZZGO.