Want my opinion then?
He's unfortunately right. The forum is mostly full of people who blindly support TFP. This is their primary method of communcation, so that's what they see. Any criticism that is actually well constructed is often shouted down by most folks on the forum, so it can be ignored (it's not ALWAYS ignored, I want to make that clear, but it often is, because TFP will just do whatever they want and folks here just stand around and clap).
Other social media, like twitter, discord, facebook, reddit, twitch, youtube... there's often a lot of criticism. I know they obviously cannot monitor all of these, but if you actually tell people to go to the forums and make their grievances in a polite and constructive manner, you know what the typical response is?
"There's no point. They won't listen and the forum is full of TFP <insert descriptive noun for supporters here which may or may not be polite>".
And I also know they can't listen to everyone. If they did, the game would never be done. The problem is, changes like this are perceived as uncessary. TFP have a habit of doing MAJOR changes (and this is) when only a slight tweak is needed. Which means folks get annoyed, and it drags out the development process.
Personally, I'm still on the side of "This is a completely unecessary change" but with a side of "I'm going to see how it plays."
Story needs to be done before gold as I believe it's a KS promise. I need to double check that.