Nostalgia of Pre-BigBang Maplestory

Seriously. Saying that the game was "dumbed down" baffles me.
Whenever I want to play something mind numbing the first game that comes is MS.
Most skills have no cooldown, other than damage reflect monsters have no life threatening skills, and if it wasn't for the 100 attack/buff limit you could just stand in the same spot for hours and hours and hours without having to do much but press your main attack and maybe buff once in a while. If it means that before BB you needed skills to use your pots in time let me just laugh. Stats? You had three options no secondary stat, low secondary stat or whatever equips required. So hard!!!

Yea, MS has always been a fairly simple game, noone is arguing about that.
By dumbing down most of us mean stuff like that the maps are now always made flat and generic, it take no planning to get the best out of them. When it comes to leveling and questing, they hold your hand and point at what you should be doing, you need absolutely no knowledge of the MS world, secret maps and smart solutions to take you through the levels in an effective way. The game before 120-140 somewhere is practically a big tutorial because of this.
If paying attention to potting is not counted as somewhat of a meaningful playing element, how do you feel about the new maple, where you never even have to use pots at all on many classes?
All the systems, as you say, are far more complicated, but the core is that they add nothing really complex to the experience.
Getting somewhere in the old maple required knowledge, willpower, teamwork and a genuine interest for the game since it was so grindy that only people who loved it could stand it. Now even a near braindead MTV stereotype kid with selfentitlement issues could go through it. Also the old maple would not let you pay your way to victory in anywhere near the same league as the current one.

That is dumbing it down right there, the way I see it.

Do note that I aint against every single update, the EXP curve was simply atrocious before the revamp waves and the lack of high lvl areas was ugly.