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First of all I agree with a lot what you wrote. Of course all this is a matter of taste. And I am not against any other taste.

I dont like that you call me dumb, I really always appreciated your postings and this is the first time I see you falling into such cheap behaviour.

You said oldschool gameplay died for good reasons. Yes, you are right, it died because it does not fit well to the consoles. I know from DNF interviews that they integrated auto-healing and restricted number of weapons only because it works better on consoles. Todays linear level design is another result of it, especially in shooters. Games like Stalker show that open level design can still work, but linear and simplified rail shooters just sell better. So in the end it is just a decision to make more money, it does not mean that it is plain better, it just feels better for the standard consoles player.

You have to understand that a consoles player is sitting in his living room on a chair with a small controller in his hand. A fast paced action gameplay is not perfect for this scenario. But a rather slow gameplay with autohealing and a cover system is more relaxing in this case. Actually the Duke was not like that, Unreal was not like that, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, they all were not like that, but these games were PC games. That is the difference.

Today you have to pay 100 million to make a decent shooter and this will not work on a PC alone, it has to be cross platform. It is a development for some reasons and does not mean that I, as a PC gamer, like this trend.

Regarding the gameplay elements: The Duke is more than a shooter. You drive through several levels, you control a remote controlled miniature car, you solve physics puzzles, you control a crane, a hoister, moving platforms and more. Compared to the big shooters it is not only more varying it is also much more intelligent gameplay, similar to Half Life 2.

If you feel offended by the humour, then the game is not for you just like Al Bundy might offend some people or Charly Harper or Leslie Nielsen. But this setting is exaggerated and unreal and thus kind of funny. Another part of the jokes is to create some relations to other games and other movies. It does not work if you dont know these games and movies. I mean there are side blows toward movies like Phantom Commando or Predator as an example. Not everybody knows these ones today.

The sentence regarding indie games was just as simple as that: Nice looking simplified shooters sell better than shooters with better gameplay but not so polished graphics. Even Crysis 2 sold weak because it did not become a new graphics revolution but everybody is looking forward to BF3 because of the great graphics. Almost nobody in these forums wrote comments or questions about the gameplay. These shooter games sell by graphics and we cannot compete in this area. So it would be a bad idea to make an indie shooter, we have to restrict to niche markets and casual games.

Crysis2 vs. DNF. Well, almost all people in these forums talked bad about Crysis2, it was too narrow, bad AI, too linear, almost no driving, too much simplified, a consoles game. All people who liked the Duke found Crysis 2 boring and many of them even did not finish it. This tells me something about it.
Of course there will be XBox 360 fans who enjoyed Crysis2, because it is a good consoles shooter, better than others. And also PC gamers played through it. But I dont talk for them, I talk for me and what I have read in several PC gamers forums.