I've been impressed by DCSS's dev team's ability and willingness to make unpopular decisions and make radical changes to the game. They seem to be principled in their decision-making.
I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly.
This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).
I feel like I see nothing but endless moaning about the development of DCSS in places like the subreddit, but I really appreciate that the devs try different things, sometimes radically so. After all, the old versions of the game are all still available to play if you don't like a given change, and the server operators (many of whom are code contributors) go out of their way to make sure that you can play even ancient versions online (it looks like CAO hosts every release since 2012), so nobody is forced to update if they don't want to. And as expected there's a healthy variety of DCSS forks, which IMO is OSS working as intended.
I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly.
This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).