OP, consider that this game is a comedy. Very often jokes are only funny the first time, or at the very least lose their potency on repeated uses. Videogames are typically built on loops where you do the same thing over and over and over.
This is why comedy in games is incredibly difficult to pull off. Any change you want to make -- say even to just the timing of something (timing is everything in comedy) -- requires a special case, or at least the ability for the designer to treat it as one. This means creating tools that are flexible enough to handle a diverse set of situations, or creating a lot of special cases, or a mixture of both.
This is just one factor as to why a game like South Park which "seems" simple isn't necessarily.
There were a lot of these comments back when Wind Waker was coming out, like why was Nintendo making such a "simple" looking game, why don't they try? Appearances can be deceiving.
I think the industry is a bit at fault for not trying to explain better the way these games are made and the resources they require. Unlike movies with all of their behind the scenes stuff, you don't get much of that with Video Games.
The industry could certainly do better, and the desire in the media to find/create and put "auteurs" on a pedestal is actively harmful to this perception as well.