Well yes... and no...
You are correct. I work on the fundamentals and improve them as needed. This is sometimes dictated by the player base, but not always. It really depends on the number of players and what the problem truly is. In this case, let's discuss map size.
Some of the player base is unhappy with the map size. How many? Well... it's hard to say, because I don't have access to any analytics of what number of players have played the game, their rate of progression, their overall star ratings for islands, the numbers and types of dinos per island, number of saves per island, etc. This is the type of data that is really needed in order to make an informed decision about the map size fundamental. It may be true that the people who are on this forum represent the majority (certainly the impassioned majority), mostly likely that's not the case.
If there have been a million copies of the game sold, probably more in the number of people that've played the game, and somewhere around 10% of them are vocal about map sizes, that is probably not enough people to really warrant disrupting the 90% of other users of this game. Therefore, I would not make the call to change this aspect of the game and risk upsetting another (potentially large percentage) of players. I think the call I would make is what Frontier have already stated: some people want bigger maps, then let's give them bigger maps without breaking other users.
I do love your second point. Every application/game/thing is born because someone has an idea, and wants to express/create/explore their idea. The best part of my job is breaking eggs (so to speak). Learning how to improve, exploring new ideas, and boldly going where no-one has gone before (at least on my team because someone has probably already gone there) is simply invigorating. While this is the best part of my job, I don't understand how it applies to changing a map size of an existing map, and creating some way to migrate all players (introducing bugs) or simply trashing the majority of players saves. This type of exploration can be done safely with new ideas on concepts instead of with old ones. True, their is the challenge of a migration, and that can be fun to explore; however, one has to weight the risks and costs of all the different ideas and approaches to a problem.
Thanks for your comment.
Thank you so much for this post, a very nice assessment of the most likely situation. Particularly the part I bolded, is the point I had been trying to make in the other thread, with limited success. Very well said.