I suppose I understand some of the disappointment, but why the hostility? The original Majesty was a fun game, but I would not call it deep. Majesty 2 is also fun, even if the focus is slightly different. If anything, given the difficulty, I would consider Majesty 2 to be less hospitable to casual gamers. Both are games that I play a few hours at a stretch, in contrast to grand strategy games or RPGs.
Majesty was a Fantasy Kingdom
SIM, it may not have been "deep" but it had more content, and the AI was more lifelike, you could play on your terms and end the game whenever you were ready, you could set up a game to have constantly invading monsters or respawning lairs and build an actual Kingdom as you saw fit. There were no time limits (except on a few missions), you could play with a lot of different flavors (elves, gnomes, dwarves, different temples), the Enemy AI acted more like monsters, the heroes had more personality and acted more like heroes, and heroes interacted with buildings.
The AI in Majesty 2 is mindless, monsters just rush and the Heroes just fight, it's basically an extremely simple RTS game in which you set flags to tell your units where to fight. The Enemy AI mindlessly bum rushes your castle and wanders aimlessly around it, and there isn't much to do besides defend and destroy lairs because the actual Sim elements are gone and building a kingdom is just a disadvantage, plus you're forced to quit playing the moment mission objectives are reached so everything you do build is immediately lost, except for your hero which gets ungodly expensive and really isn't worth the investment half the time.
For a fan of Real Sims, games like Dungeon Keeper 2, Majesty Gold, and Evil Genius, Majesty 2 was a slap in the face. They said they were sticking to the formula, they pitched it as a Sim game, the word Sim is in the Title, but this isn't a Fantasy Kingdom Sim. The list of complaints that fans of Majesty 1 had could fill several pages and they have, the hostility is not towards fans of this drek it's towards the people who lied to us and sold us Majesty 2 under false pretenses.
For a long time a lot of us held out hope that Paradox would make it right, but go over the history of this forum, back months you'll find the spillout when people realized that wasn't the case. Read the What's Missing thread, you'll find a lot of it neatly compiled in there. The reason these comparison threads are so common is because a lot of Majesty fans feel betrayed, and this game has permanently tarnished Paradox's reputation in my eyes, and I'm not the only one.
