Not to go too philosophical about this, but I feel like this is an example of why a game-publisher / development studio (all in one, which isnt that common in the industry, outside of military-simulation-style games) that disregards the need for a Creative Director ends up paying for it in the end when their user-base complains about issues like this.
What a creative director role means is that in an entire project-team, which is almost entirely outfitted with more-than-enough people who watch the code-reusability, resource-hours and the bottom-line, and think about profit, that you need a 'principal-level' person to go into a business-meeting and say something like "i know it will cost us, but its worth it.' and then you usually need a track-record of success to stand behind when they laugh.
its actually very, almost too-easy, to make everything be about a profit. The reason the smart and successful companies demand that their marketing/product-owner allow some tshirt-wearing, unshaven person have equal-stakeholder status is because the company's owners know that if you just let your 'suits' decide everything, it will go to shit, and lack 'soul'. it happens literally everyday in the business. its how marketing people get fired and how they blow-it, often before even starting the production of something, just while figuring out the needed roles and team-structure.
I worked at activision in like 2009/10 and this whole 'microtransaction' model was a very hot topic in design-circles and a very tough sell to business-people at the time. "ok so we let people into the game for free, to not only play and have to see and envy paying-users, but to also POPULATE THE WORLD for paying users to have fun killing them" (EVE Online, Planetside, was an early example to point at) it was genius, but it was not an easy sell at all, and it took someone with a long chain of award-winning and profitable results in their resume to put it all on the line and fight for that up the chain of business-people and shareholders.
a creative director and any 'designer' is , or needs to be, a fighter. otherwise decisions are made with only two of the three needed principals of success. sure, you need your technicians to keep it 'grounded and achievable' and you need your marketing and project-managers to ensure income and costs etc, but too often these days, they decide to just hire some kid to 'draw stuff we tell them to' instead of a qualified, experienced, and expensive, creative with a qualified body-of-work to backup their ideas, vision and the sheer will to create something special. Its not a surprise to me that this is often done in games that are developed overseas like russia, korea, china, india, eastern europe, where engineering and business are very important, but creative-design is really not. (also why high-fidelity simulators like this one are not really made in the west. we dont have their talents either! but at least we know their value and outsource for it. they often do not.)
thats my jaded west-coast opinion. im really happy with how DCS's model worked out. Oleg Maddox and IL2 went bankrupt selling periodic-releases of everything for 60$ a pop, and when LockOn shifted to BlackShark and DCSWorld-model, it sounded pretty crazy, but they pulled it off! i spend and even early-access everything they do because of my desire to support this great 'purchase each aircraft if you want to fly it' model. but i think its pretty silly to charge for maps at all and its too short-sighted. never paywall the game-world. thats just a no-brainer.