Yes, but I think maybe people in this thread are painting it unfairly? Another way to frame it is that they used industry best practices and their intuition to develop the game, then revisited their decisions to see if they still made sense. When they didn't, they updated the game. It's normal for any product to be imperfect on initial release. It's part of actually getting to market.

FWIW, the PC install size was reasonable at launch. It just crept up slowly over time.

    But this means that before they blindly trusted 
    some stats without actually testing how their 
    game performed with and without it?

I'm just a little baffled by people harping on this decision and deciding that the developers must be stupid or lazy.

I mean, seriously, I do not understand. Like what do you get out of that? That would make you happy or satisfied somehow?