Haven't even heard of those two games, I have heard about Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld though. And yes, these games have incredibly good AI for simulation. Most players don't really know what they want, just like most people (me included) don't know what they want most of the time and we just go with the flow.
In fact I think I've only heard one person ever say that he doesn't like open-ended worlds without objective or meaning. I do agree to a certain degree there, but I think it depends ultimately on what we like to do.
Well, my concept of "dream game" is somewhat similar to yours and while I agree that many things could be fleshed out, to me at least it's interesting to see the justification behind your choices. My post is the same in that regard, it's not about my "dream" game since I have tons, but it's mostly about the reasons why a game would be considered a dream game...
Will check out those two games.
I'm a wealth of wisdom on obscure games. A while back someone asked if anyone in my local group could "Remember Infantry Online?" and I was the only person in the room who had even heard of it (other than him) and played it (albeit not very much, because I discovered it well past its glory days and was more interested on a theoretical level).
Sadly, my knowledge of more modern games is less expansive than that of the games that were around when I was a kid.
But that's cool, a lot of modern games aren't really that good as some people make them to be. I have a draft ready to give some love to old Tabletop RPG games. I admit I thought they were really boring until I actually played them.
I mean, the thing about modern games is that they need to iterate successfully over old ones to be worth playing for people who have had good experiences for old games. Some of it's taste, but there's also a lot of questions about whether or not people are really delivering quality. I think there are a lot of good modern games, and that maybe even games on average are better than they used to be, but they struggle to really break even with old classics.