I can accept that, but that whole notion is still a cop-out.

You'll still need generic difficulty settings, and if you're building nothing but cheating AI, players are still going to run into issues of unbalanced gameplay against cpu opponents.

Putting all the details onto sliders to make it customizable is basically the devs throwing up their hands and saying, "fuck it, we don't know, you pick what you want". They didn't actually build a better game, they let you build it.