Discussions, post-mortems, analysis, inflated egos, and all that jazz.

A question for all players: Why don't hardcore fans of the original game play HotA at all, while hardcore fans of the newer versions (or whatever you call yourselves) play with SoD?

Hmm. The answer "I don't like it" probably won't be satisfactory. Because it will be followed by the question - what exactly...
I don't like the abundance of new objects, which adds variety to scenarios but doesn't work with the overall game balance (as was the case, for example, in WoTA, when the schools of magic were balanced by moving damage spells to water and protection to fire, and slow was on the second level, balancing skills with classes and updated functionality). I don't like the graphical redraws of existing elements (orcs, pikemen), the redraws of the battlefield landscape, and the avatars of individual heroes. In fact, the graphics are what repels me the most.
The number of new objects in HotA is, in my opinion, excessive.
Some of HotA's solutions are great, some, in my opinion, are unnecessary. The amount of unnecessary things, personally for me, outweighs the amount of useful ones.
And between the HotA version and the WoTA version, with the addition of simultaneous turn play and timely bug fixes, I would choose WoTA. Between SoD and WoTA, I would choose WoTA, especially since the settings allowed me to play WoTA like SoD. But between SoD and HotA, my choice is definitely SoD.