It was really hard for the devs to go completely wrong with DE. After all, the base game they had as a starting point is one of the best games in the world (at least in the minds of aoe fans.)Are you talking about DE or about AoE4?
For someone who played aoe2 only casually, or only many many years previously, and just started again with the release of DE, there are so many small changes that were brought about in the DE edition that would simply go completely unnoticed.
For people like me who played the game religiously for years on voobly, even those small things had a huge impact on the gameplay. Who knows how much time I've spent complaining about how my knights don't surround the xbows the way I remember, about how they completely changed the maps I played the most, about how awful the matchmaking is, about how unnecessary new civs are, about how blatantly OP xbows/most ranged units are, about how being able to select more than 40 units together made ranged units even more OP, etc, etc. The fact is that many people don't even have the same memories of the original game that I have, much less would they agree that the changes I outlined are even a problem at all.