You said it. "It depends." is the short answer to basically every design question.
It's funny. Since I've was diagnosed diabetic, I eat more sweets than I used to. On the other hand, I switched to diet soda and moved to control my carbs better. Really, I guess I'm just choosier about what sugar I consume. If I only get so much, I want it to be the good stuff.
Mmm, tastes just right, maybe it was just to do with the temperature in the room when I was mixing it or something. Might've been a bit colder than usual? I dunno, I don't pretend to know much about baking.
No deer this morning, but that's okay. Saw a bunch of squirrels, including one white squirrel, and a woodpecker. When I got home I took an egg, 1/2 a stick of butter, and a little block of cream cheese out of the fridge to warm up, as I'm gonna bake a 6" pound cake later on today.
But it's always been the games where I leaned in on my tastes, fought to keep mechanics/theme intact, and didn't worry if anyone else would want to play the game that did the best. I need to trust that more and stop pre-placating critics.
I hit a patch in my career where I spent way too much time self-censoring my designs to remove randomness, take-that elements, and such, but none of that stuff sold in the end. Now I'm coming back into freelancing with a renewed sense of my own style and tastes, and not everyone's gonna like that.
I love BGG as a resource, but sometimes the groupthink there is poisonous for a game designer. You start worrying about all the little arbitrary truisms that this game element or that game element are never good inclusions, and that's just not true. If you follow all the rules, you make soggy bread.
With the old version of the game, I was worrying too much about the hypothetical audience, so I toned things way down. But that just made it bland, and this needs to be a silly game full of moments where the table cracks up at someone's (mis)fortune or clever/lucky play.
Right now I have too many 'boring' heroes, which are just dice and no special rules for the round. I still want a couple of them, but way fewer. Dealing with the heroes' weird rules is part of what keeps things spicy. Similarly, adding more missions that do weird things in your empire.