It all fine to write something like that article but this guy is obviously not a designer or maker of games. 

There are a couple of reasons that his vision won't come true easily. 

1) The same community who keeps asking for these changes is the same community that fights like hell against any major shake-ups to their precious formula. Take Hacking for instance. It was certainly not the usual spying mechanic that 4x games have come to know or expect. But because a player couldn't perfectly defend against it or predict the exact out come there was a huge outcry about it. And it doesn't stop there. Every time there is a major change coming down the pipeline for the way things work in 4x games, the community turtles up and shakes their collective fist because they cannot perfectly control an aspect of the game...all the while groaning about subpar AI. 

2) All the changes you want to make to the forumla cannot be encapsulated into a single 4x game. This is important because we've gotten so used to asking for more and more and more...that we don't stop to think about how complicated and complex this makes a 4x game. And we still want a competent AI on top of that. 4x game developers should be choosing specific aspects to focus on and ignoring the rest to make a focused 4x experience...not all-inclusive. It's nice that you want to add a peaceful faction that survives by singing kumbya across the galaxy...but if its surrouned by factions that want to eat its face it is going to fall.

3) Which again brings me to my third point. Sword of the Stars was an excellent game for its time. It didn't pretend to be a micromanagement simulator where you moved population pips around in your planets to make the perfect setup. It was about war. And it had a totally random tech tree (some techs were core) that could continually surprise a player with what they got. And they had to play the hand that they were dealt. It was the same for players and AI alike. (Oh and it had diplomacy that worked and made sense). It had races that were totally different and had differing methods of FTL...I have not seen any 4x game since then do that. That is because we all want to shove more and more crap into the games we play so that everyone can have exactly the experience that that they want. Except that that particular game is a pipe-dream. There is no one-size fits all 4x because inevitably some aspects will suffer and be left to flounder while other aspects are played up. But the more we stuff into a 4x game, the more diluted all the other aspects will be.

So to conclude, it is the very 4x community that is dampening the creativity and innovation in 4x games. Along with the developers who cannot say no this will not be a part of the game ever and concentrate on the things that it can do well. We need to get back to making 4x games for diverse audiences so that we can have the diversity of gameplay that we all say we want. But it cannot be in a single game.