I’m afraid you might be a little too late with it.
The problem wasn’t the mode, though, rather, it was the players… which, I suppose, they had earlier cultivated with their particular course of action and design direction, driving away those who liked to use their brain at least a bit and attracting those ADHD (adjective) connoisseurs and aficionados of all that ‘exciting’ 
stuff. That’s what you’d call a metagame failure! Literally, and not what some erroneously mean by ‘meta’.