It's not only about likes or dislikes, it can even damage the reputation of your game. If you included this kind of content very far into development it would have balanced itself, but in this case it didn't, and as I can see it was one of the things that led to this problem. You also have to take in consideration who is really your audience at the time.
You can compare it with how disappointing the last Summertime Saga update was, because of the vote of the majority. You can't replace good direction with populism, specially when the majority tend to be wrong. It's not t about pleasing everyone either, is about a good pace in the game. The dog fucking feels really out of place, regardless of who included it.
Hardly. If you are the developer you are the boss regardless of who throw money at you, which is why I insist this is just a replacement of suits, and if that's the case I can just stick to AAA games.