It’s also that if your business model is primarily focused on recurring income from DLC, you’ll prioritise that over ‘fixing’ (or whatever word you want to use) core gameplay mechanics that simply aren’t very good/meaningful/add complexity rather than complication. They got lucky with EU3/4 because both were building off an existing solid base, when they try something new it seems to go badly wrong
As someone else alluded to, I think they could do with a lot of new blood at a senior level because they don’t seem to be able to approach game design or post-release game design in any way other than the traditional ‘paradox’ way.