Yeah, blame your customers.

Simplifying is really different from what they did which is completely alter characters, unnecessarily kill off characters, introduce new plots that didn’t exist, etc. The Lord of the Rings movies, and the recent Dune movie both did a lot of that but are considered fantastic adaptations. Even Game of Thrones was an excellent adaptation for the first ~5 seasons and had huge mass market appeal while still being complex.

This is just shitty writers making excuses.