The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
To be fair, I needed some serious help in RCT. The under the hood mechanics were NOT intuitive to me.
I replayed it recently and the hidden mechanics are just bad game design. Not docking the game but there’s no way to tell the reasons for certain scenario failures, even when addressing all the customer thoughts and using all existing information.
I haven’t played rtc in 20 yrs, but I remember completing every park task except for dinky Park. I got really close one time, but was just short when the time ran out. Just a few months ago I randomly came across a video on how to beat it, and now I want to play it again but can’t find it.