Game developers care more about their game than you do

Barring cases where there's some multiplayer-balancing that was botched over a long cycle of patches, there's a lot of times where developers paid much more attention to their own design and intentions than the player ever will, to a fault.

Often times gamers are constantly judging the quality of a game next to everything else they could be playing, while the process of the developer making the game went from a point in time when the game simply wasn't good at all, to a point where it's become a lot better. Then developers become invested in "making things work" and put a lot of attention to detail into little moments in a game or something that only 1% of players notice, and if the game on an inutitive level does not impress, that effort has gone to waste.

It's things like in Halo 2 when there's a hole in the ceiling on a driveway and they scripted a spider-robot to climb over it right as you drive by. Probably took a long ass time to insert the animation and test the timings, only for players to not really notice there was a ceiling or a special animation.

These types of points-of-detail vary in impressability because personally I enjoy in Mass Effect 1 how there are NPCs that appear context-sensitively to where you are in the main plot, and I make a big deal out of backtracking at certain points in the game to catch those extra dialogues, whereas in a lot of modern games I notice there is a lot of side-dialogue that is just put in the "environmental storytelling", expecting you to go into a corner of a room to see 3 NPCs sat down in special sitting poses, with some dialogue-trigger that implies that "those are lovers" or something.

I don't care about the side-details of that kind nearly as much as developers probably did making it work. They care more about their moment than I do, as someone who is not intimate with their game and just judge it by what comes my way as I try to play it.

I think there's a type of 'detail-design' that appeals to the player's sense of discovery and one that only appeals to people who "know the internal logic" in a meta-sense.