Ideas and suggestions.

I don't understand why they add some mechanics that are foreign to the Heroes series, and then try to figure out how to best implement and balance them... just for the sake of it?

Because this is what they constantly do in threads like "Ideas and Suggestions." If some of these ideas are refined here to a level where they are adequate in terms of gameplay, they still have to go through filters of classicism, atmosphere, game logic, difficulty of implementation, and so on. Not all of them will survive this journey.