The way I see it, the main problem of PoE and WL2 was that the actual expectations of people for them were similar to "first class" games because of the Kickstarter hype. The actual games had small budgets and were made by teams that HAD to play it safe because if they didn't, they could forget funding anything else through KS. It might sound weird, but my definition of a "middle class" RPG was Dragon Age 2. It wasn't as big a release as Origins, it was made by a more or less experienced team that had done previous very successful AAA titles, it tried a few new things but without the resources to see them implemented properly, and it ended up in the shit can.
The whole "middle of the road" RPG implies that it was something we expected more off, so no rational conversation about them can happen. We (correctly) forgive everything to Underail/AoD, but if e.g. Bioware or I don't know who else of the big guys, ever attempt something a bit different with a smaller budget, then the shit hose opens and it never closes until the lead designer commits seppuku and we piss on his grave. Apart from pure internet hate, the problem is exactly that. The games don't have good enough production values to be AAA, and not bad enough production values to be considered indies that we forgive everything because they will attempt to jerk off our favorite fetish. So they float onto the pile of shit and nothing new is ever tried in a middle scale.
Before anyone gets me on D:OS being the example of a "middle rpg", Larian still counts psychologically as a small studio doing a release with much better production values than we expected (hence the torrents of love). If D:OS was a Bethesda game, the reactions would be different (and I am a great fan of the game).
EDIT: I've never rolled before and I pressed it by mistake, so fuck it.