I'd push back against that interpretation of the developer's design choices. Kerbal's use of patched conic approximations greatly lowers the difficulty of the game (it is a game) for most players; it enables a simple and coherent UI/UX; and it guarantees fixed orbits that make difficult in-space rendezvous like the Apollo program's accessible. Like Minecraft cubes, it creates a reliable foundation of simple abstractions that people can reason about, and build complicated strategies on top of. (Wouldn't Minecraft be unplayable if instead of cubes, it was arbitrary user-defined convex polyhedra? It's like that).
Upping the realism lowers the playability: games and simulators are subtly different things. Otherwise we'd all be playing STK/Astrogator instead of Kerbal, and AutoCAD instead of Minecraft, and sitting in city hall basements debugging spreadsheets in place of Cities: Skylines. The type of limitations that distinguish games from serious simulators are not accidents and not laziness, but deliberate design choices.
I concede this makes certain interesting topics like Lagrange points / halo orbits, masscons, and orbital precession inaccessible. That's part of the tradeoff.
Upping the realism lowers the playability: games and simulators are subtly different things. Otherwise we'd all be playing STK/Astrogator instead of Kerbal, and AutoCAD instead of Minecraft, and sitting in city hall basements debugging spreadsheets in place of Cities: Skylines. The type of limitations that distinguish games from serious simulators are not accidents and not laziness, but deliberate design choices.
I concede this makes certain interesting topics like Lagrange points / halo orbits, masscons, and orbital precession inaccessible. That's part of the tradeoff.