Haven't seen the demo yet, but I think Dark Souls was a substantial improvement over Demons' Souls. I argue that BioWare and Bethesda get backlash due to generally being lazy trout developers, and that backlash attaches to any old excuse due to the inability of general audiences to think critically and build appropriate arguments rather than the dupe work being the actual crux of the issue.

The FromSoft design philosophy seems very much gameplay-oriented wherein they iterate on and fine tune concepts, and I'm honestly about that. It was a miss for me with DS2, but it was cool to see them play around with different things.

100% agree that BB invasion mechanics are vastly superior to any of their other work, and it baffles me to hear they're turning away from that to go back to the nuisance engine.