Those are all examples of good game design changes. All of those changes improved the game play. Not just improved it, but did so substantially from before they existed. None of those are what could be considered “realism nerfs” (which is a bit of a subjective term) to me and really further proves the point of how “realism” is a double-edged sword of where it can enhance or hinder game play depending on how well it is pulled off. Some realism is good, but not when it makes game play feel more tedious and time wasting. For example the changes that were added to vehicle repair times where if you bumped into a shrub you get to waste a whole day fixing the damage (maybe a bit of an embellishment, but you get the point) is a good example of “bad realism” for a game. At the same time you want vehicles to take a certain amount of wear over time to encourage careful driving and to maintain certain limits where the game would quit presenting a challenge.
To me a good indicator of when you have a “bad realism” feature is when it starts to make a game feel more like you’re enduring druge-work instead of playing. It’s fine that there is upkeep and it’s an important part of the game, but there is a good balance in there somewhere. I mean if all you do is hack and slash without upkeep then it becomes tedious like an action game, but if you have to spend too much time supporting the ability to hack, slash, explore, and progress then it feels more like a work/chore simulator at some point. This is often when you start hearing the term “grind” coined. I mean really any RPGlike game has some amount of “grinding”, but if they got it right, it never is perceived as “grinding” because the pacing was on the mark. Or another way to think of it, they’re best when they have a good balance of combat and non-combat activities driven along by some need to do both a certain amount, otherwise their is no point to them. It’s not easy to get the work (e.g., the amount of eating, drinking, and crafting you must do in order to support your survival and progression in the game) vs. reward tuned just perfectly that it is always fun to the player. There will be players that like more the upkeep aspects than others, but at the same time there ideally is still reward for them if they want to do more than necessary to maintain. They get ahead of the “survival curve” as a result and it pays off in other ways (i.e., it becomes more a question of play style and strategy in tackling the overall game). So somewhere there is a happy balance of what is required upkeep to just merely maintain basic progression throughout the game, and extra time put above that still has its rewards (like “extra credit”). It’s not easy finding those sweet spots, but it is more revealed through extensive play by players as it becomes clearer how things work out in practice.
On a side note: The main thing that really bugged me about the extended vehicle repair times was that it wasn’t very turn-based. It actually made the player sit there and wait in real time. In a turn-based game game time should never influence how much real time must pass. It simply instantly fast-forwards to the moment of completion (maybe pausing for player input if any important events come up in the process) and your cost is how many days, hours, minutes of game time had to passed to reach completion and the effects it has on resources etc. Though someone explained to me that the real-time waiting was more of an unintended side-effect of keeping track of and playing out events in the reality bubble (i.e., processing time for playing the “turns” of anything going on it).
