I don't think this is something that needs to be debated very much, there are much better things to debate.
There should be CTH in JA3 and even if for some reason devs don't want to include it, they should allow people to toggle it.
I think the developers honestly began trying to come up with new ideas for JA, which is great, but then they forgot to check if these new ideas, despite being new, were also a good fit for JA. Which they are not, some of the time.
New ideas are good, but if the new ideas suck or are better suited to another genre (and almost every new idea is good in some way or has something going for it, but it doesn't mean it should be implemented in every genre or franchise), and it doesn't mean every new idea should be implemented in the current project being worked on.