The number of gamers that will honestly argue that it's a bad thing to make a game easier to learn.
I guess people like their elitist clubs. As a player of one of the most niche and hard-to-learn games, I don't get it. I want more friends to play video games with.
I sort of agree, but that's because making games easier to learn often dumbs them down, introduces assloads of trolls into the community, or both. It'd be like if they translated LotR into Wikipedia-esque Simple English. A lot of the magic of the books would be lost and the stuffy Tolkien purists would be besieged by idiots who can't spell.
Sometimes, the difficulty of learning a game is part of its charm, anyway. [read: Tawarochir is a dorf fort/nethack/cataclysm fanatic with a +13 to Will saving throws and opposed Sense Motive-to-Diplomacy rolls]
You can find a HECK OF A LOT more pathetically easy games that overly coddle you and hit you over the head with unskippable tutorials then you can find games where you genuinely need to learn how to play.
If I am going to use a game as a comparison... Lets say Lands of Lore
I am not going to sit here and pretend like Lands of Lore is a genuinely perfect game... it had a lot of problems namely its horrible mess of an interface, stupid copyright protection, and sometimes the game could get REALLY insane with the solutions. In fact its biggest issue is how hard it is to play and the fact that you have to either memorize everything or have the manual infront of you in order to play. It makes the game nearly unplayable even for me.
Yet the fact that you can get stumped on a puzzle and have to think things out... is a novelty games DESPISE! "Lets make it easier to learn, we should have the game TELL YOU that you can freeze water with freeze spells" at which I would go "Heck no! The game rewarded you for thinking AND it was what you were expected to discover without the game telling you".
It isn't Elitism it is just knowing that the game had a edge and requires a certain level of thinking in order to play. The game doesn't hand you the solutions and I value the game because of it. What it needs is a better interface, tell you what items do, and tell you what the spell levels do. By making the game "Easier to learn" you are taking away the point of the game which is "thinking".
People are against videogames removing thinking from the equation. Sure a lot more people would be able to play, but it would be like replacing all Bikes with bikes with irremovable training wheels so "everyone can learn", which is what people are against.
Is that Elitist? Maybe, but your being egalitarian.