Very much false. You fail to understand the principles of open source software. There is no person with the “right” to accept or reject suggestions. There are, however, people with the responsibility to do so.
To be more blunt: There’s nobody here who really gets to decide which direction the game goes or anything. There’s just somebody here(kevingranade) who is generously taking on the responsibility of looking at what the community(in particular the devs) want, and reaching a decision that is agreeable with the majority.
If he were not doing that, if he were just coming up with decisions of his own, regardless of what others think or whether these decisions ultimately benefit the community, somebody would make a fork, and that fork would gain critical mass over the main project. It’s essentially a form of “selection through competition”(which is ironic, because open source development is often viewed as more communistic-leaning).
The consequence of this is, that nobody in this community actually has the power to permanently lock the game into a direction that appeals only to a minority of potential users(even if that minority currently is the majority of actual users). It’s very much possible for such a fork to exist, but it’s not possible to lock down all forks. Open source projects are, by nature, inclusive.
As we add certain features, such as tileset support, more extensive crafting and survival gameplay, a more open and widely-themed sandbox world, it is my guess that the game also becomes more interesting to players who aren’t strictly speaking interested in a roguelike/permadeath. My suggestion is to accept this, and to allow the game to diverge into this direction naturally. There’s no telling that no-permadeath would actually become the prelevant playstyle, and even if that were to happen, it would likely take a long time.
However, refusing even the slightest step into that direction, is certain to alienate potential users. Most of them will leave as a result. The fact that there’s so many in this thread arguing for the option, who have not left as a result of the highly hostile reaction to such suggestions, indicates that these people aren’t that few.
But meanwhile, we are adding more and more other features, that raise the interest of such people in the game, and maybe at some point there will be enough “inertia” behind this for an actual fork to crop up. At that point, will we really be willing to add increased effort for merging and managing patches(yeah, fork X fixed that bug, but it’d be difficult to merge into our fork, sorry), just so players interested in permadeath don’t have to be bothered by the option to turn it off?
That’s what I’m worried about. I think we can all agree that the matter of adding such an option or not is incredibly minor. It’s the mentality and long-term consequences of said mentality that could get really ugly.