It's dumbed down because the basics are way less detailed and emergent than the original. You have no real inventory, instead you choose a really limited loadout that prevents soldiers from taking more than 1 grenade or 1 medkit unless they get some equally gamey class-based upgrade.
I'll admit that the old Xcom allowed for much more flexible loadouts. I'll also admit that spending five minutes ordering my men to acquire SANE loadouts, every time, was a huge pain. I remember more than one time arriving on the field to discover that instead of one rifle, one pistol, and two clips per man, my troops had decided on more interesting loadouts, such as one soldier carrying three rifles and no bullets, another one with a pistol and a pile of rifle ammo...
Yeah, I might wax nostalgic for the old days of carrying two grenades, but I don't think I'll go back.
The strategic layer is very gimped, as the aliens no longer act with purpose, but instead are just there to get fought off by you when the script deems it appropriate.
Did they 'act with purpose' in the old one? As I recall, scouts and battleships and whatnot tended to just wander around. I mean, they had those ten mission types, but they all boiled down to "Fly around a bit, land maybe." Doesn't really matter whether it's labelled an abduction mission or resource mining or what. None of them fulfilled any strategic objective. Even the supply ships did not, in fact, carry supplies- You could shoot them down all your wanted and it'd nerve starve out the alien base. Heck, you could interrogate everyone onboard and not get the base's location.
Even moreso on the tactical map, where 90% of the time you'd just fine snakemen moseying through random fields of grass. The aliens never really had any sense of tactics or any real objectives.
There is nothing intuitively realistic about the Simoleon prices in the strategic layer, they're all really nonsensical for the sake of balance. There's a slew of oddities and limitations only there to introduce balance to X-Com features broken by streamlining (such as explosives that liquidate weapon fragments).
Were prices ever realistic? 500,000 dollars for an interceptor is incredibly low. Even 1970's aircraft cost four times that, according to my incredibly unscientific ten second wikipedia search that could easily be inaccurate. I don't mind the elimination of all the extra zeroes anyway.
The only reason it's more tactical in any way is because it's easier to program an AI for a simpler system. And even with that in mind, a lot of the difficulty stems from gamey bullshit, such as the soldier limit or the inability to respond to more than one location at a time.
I wouldn't necessarily say that the difficulty stems from superior AI (Certainly, I've seen my fair share of aliens completely ignoring cover) or that the new cover system is easier to program for than the old.
By and large, I'd make three statements about the new XCOM
1. It has definitely gained much in the way of efficiency. Many of the old headaches are gone.
2. Some of these simplifications did result in a "Dumbing down" that reduces tactical complexity and makes impossible options that should very much be possible. Picking up a dead soldier's equipment, for example. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to use kyle's medkit.
3. The number of dumbs gained is much smaller than the number of headaches removed or the number of worthy features retained, and the spirit of the game remains the same; XCOM is a worthy successor to the X-COM name.
