Seen this on gaf :

“We're not taking things that people in the west hate and fixing them to make western players buy it. People sometimes make that assumption, or they've got that fear, but that's not the case at all.”

...

“The seamless nature of the maps really has a ripple effect on the gameplay,” explains Fujioka. “We have to decide based on that what to fine tune, what to leave alone.”

...

“If you want to ask where we draw the line between 'change this' and 'don't change that',” says Fukioka, “then that's what the difference is: do our new seamless gameplay design and seamless monster interactions necessitate a change, or do they not? It certainly isn't appeasement to get sales to a casual western audience - the new gameplay has to mesh with the new concept or else it would just be a mess.”

...

“You can trust us. We've been making these games for over a decade. We know action, we know Monster Hunter action, and we want players not just to enjoy the game, not just to buy the game, but we want Monster Hunter fans to feel like this is a Monster Hunter game through and through when they play it. That it one of our key goals, and we're never going to lose sight of that, so don't worry.”

Talking about current gen consoles :

“We really wanted to go further than ever before to portray a living, breathing ecosystem, a world that looks like even if you didn't turn up, it would still be getting on with its business without you - the interactions between monsters and creatures, predator-prey, survival of the fittest stuff.

“To do that, it became clear to us that the current generation of home consoles was the place to be, not just visually. It lets us enhance the AI behaviours and use that extra computational power to make the actual interaction between all the monsters, creatures and hunters more believable than ever in terms of feeling alive.”

Full interview: 

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/06/26/dont-worry-capcoms-not-dumbing-down-monster-hunter

There was never any evidence of that to begin with. I never heard one of those salty Nintendo purists elaborate on what exactly was westernized.

It was one of the more interesting episodes for sure.  But a series such as MH that went from psp exclusive to Nintendo exclusive was always going to cause shockwaves amongst the hardcore when it returned home. 

After watching ProJared's video on it, it certainly sounded so. Seems to be shaping up to be a great game, and i'm definitely interested in it, but even though i have a PS4 i want to wait and see on what they'll do when it comes to the Switch.

Dang! It should have been on the Switch! The amount of sales they would loose!

As the song says... Let it goooo!! 

Yea its getting obnoxious now.

  "Faster eating animations + eating while walking" is one of the reasons, that alone makes the game much easier in boss encounters, one of the nice things about single player is exactly finding a time window to use potions during the boss fight.

  "The hookshot" that makes your moviments faster making it easier to run and evade from the bosses.

  "lowered IA" there's times where the rathalos acts dumb, he just keeps flying around doing nothing, not even low rank rathalos in the psp version does that.

   There are only two positive points in this new version: the loading times being taken out and the world being more detailed.

  And i don't get why you think the criticism comes from nintendo purists only, i play mh since the 2 on psp and i didn't like some of the changes that makes the game easier and pretty much anyone can play this game, it's gonna be on pc and by the looks of the game any pc from 2008 can run it.

And what does anything of that has to do with westernizing? Ever thought about the possibility that the developers wanted to steer it in a faster and more action oriented direction?

Perfect.  

@scofield did you really just list eating while walking as dumbing down?  Not being able to walk while eating was the real dumbing down.  He said in an interview that it's a natural feature to add seeing as you can't easily escape the map like you used to which makes it harder.