I never said that WD shouldn't exist. I did say that I would rather have seen Silohuette Mirage stay in Japan than have people's first experience of it be the localized hack. I will say that the VA work for the game was fantastic, though. Can't hate on that part at all. I can still hear "reflector!" and "I like flowers very much!" all these years later.
The whole thing was by gamers, for gamers, right? So if you like the game so much that you want to localize it, why change the gameplay at all? Their wacky and juvenile translations are a completely separate argument I don't want to get into right now, but messing with the gameplay itself? Bug fixes are one thing, sure, but they did mess with a lot of games from Lunar 2 on SCD to Elemental Gearbolt to poor little SM in some weird ways that I find questionable.
If you think you can improve a game over what the developer created, I disagree with that already. If the reason was a business reason above a gameplay reason, that's like 100x worse. I can't agree with that at all.
edit: cool, HG101 has a neat write-up about how over the top the changes were. Can we link HG101 here? Anyone that cares can look up, I guess.