I s'pose people just want what they were shown. Who'da thought, eh?
Even in the GDC '07 presentation, things were so much more... Fluid? Like, city building: You didn't have a set number of spaces, the walls just kinda shifted to where you needed. Same with tribal villages. I think people are so disappointed because these things were removed, after they were just shown. The Molyneux maneuver was pulled.
I'm not saying that EA is the villain here, and forced Maxis to cut content to save for expansions. It could've just as easily been technical. But the shallow cut-down toy we got was a sore disappointment, and I had mediocre expectations. People were wanting to do crazy things that no one else had thought of that would've been near impossible for the devs to implement. But after waiting for this thing since the sixth grade, I expected to at least be able to put campfires and huts wherever I wanted, not just a cookie-cutter template (as was demonstrated at GDC '05).
I also recall a post on the Sporum where a former Maxis intern, freed from his NDA, mentioned that creatures in early builds actually obeyed physics (to an extent), used their structural morphology to their advantage, and generally had a purpose as to the arrangement of their body. Now we have creatures that use the same parts simply because they give the best stat points.
By the same hand that we have a total lack of realism, it could be worse: Creatures could be forced into wearing Hecker brand sneakers. But I digress.