I do share the misgiving that there is a disconnect between the player's reasonable goals, the player's reasonable choices, and the resulting outcomes. It is true that some of the game's genius resides in the fact that you cannot just powergame your way through it. But I've still found aspects somewhat frustrating every time I've played.
The thing to understand is that reality is counterintuitive, often like this game. If reasonable people doing reasonable things always obtained reasonable outcomes, the world wouldn't be the way it is. Rather, the world is a system in which the reasonable action towards a reasonable goal tends to create a pushback that thwarts progress to the point where it is often counterproductive. Often, achieving a goal involves doing exactly the opposite, causing this backlash to work in the direction you want.
I get it. As I said, this is a real part of the game's genius: that it
presents as a kind of simplified turn-based strategy game (akin to a BBS door game like Barren Realms Elite or something) in which your goal is to manage a settlement to create maximal military power to expand your land and subjugate your neighbors, but then
plays as a somewhat idealized account of Celtic tribal morality or whatever, in which the goal is not to maximize scale and military power, but to manage a tribe that is in accord within itself as well as with its neighbors, nature/spirits/gods, and its cultural principles (embodied by its ancestors).
This is super clever. And it's coupled with a visual aesthetic and written style (subject to things that I find aggressively stupid and almost designed to ruin the player experience, such as the ducks) that are as mature and sophisticated as this gameplay trick. For all this, I think that KODP is a beautiful game and an important one.
But I guess that still doesn't change my underlying issue, which is simply that when a game presents a simplified turn-based strategy game in which you expand your territory, develop your HQ, and conquer your enemies, and then doesn't really let you play that way, it inevitably will lead to player frustration. The designers made a deliberate bait-and-switch, and they get the credit and the blame for the consequences. Likewise, the hero quests present as CYOAs in which if you select the right character and properly reenact the story, you should prevail. And those quests are amazingly well done -- I love the way in which the quest approximates the story but isn't identical, so you don't have a script to follow. But there's then this random layer where, as noted, you might fail (in a significant way!) despite doing everything right, or might succeed despite doing many things wrong.
You don't need to persuade me that the real world works like this. You don't need to persuade me that myth itself often works this way. I get it. But a central aspect of what makes a game a game is the orderliness of its rules. Referees making bad calls isn't a feature; it's a glitch. But KODP is full of refs making bad calls. And it is full of that childhood experience where you're playing a game for the first time, make what seems like a winning move, and then your friend says, "ACTUALLY there's another rule I didn't mention before, and that means I win." Does all of this mimic real life? Sure. But, again, with the credit comes the blame. No one has fun in real life when stuff happens for no good reason. You might stoically bear it or greet it with gallows humor. But no one thinks, "Awesome, love that the NBA finals were decided by the ref improperly calling a foul." Or "Fantastic, my best efforts to reconcile with a friend were completely misunderstood." Mimicking these frustrations in a game may be clever, but it's not necessarily fun.
