This is true but Square's decision was made to avoid confusion of people getting the risk to buy the version with less content. The definitive edition has slightly (again slightly) better resolution but slightly simple models and most important: It has more content so they decided it was better to make available the version with worse lightning and more content. I would understand the concern if the Definitive edition was THAT much inferior, but it's not: 

They should've done what the Ori developers did and give the original version as an extra freebie to people who buy the new version. 

I agree this was the best route but they already had the new game built from the ground with all additions. This was not a DLC with new maps and skills, it had many differences in the story, it's something akin to Persona vanilla vs royal. 

Edit: What they could have done was if you have an installed version (either physical or digital) you can get a copy of the definitive edition for something like 30 USD or less

I think anytime the original version of something gets delisted it should come with the new one. The same sort of thing should really happen with remakes as well like how the original version of Metroid comes with Zero Mission.

I never played vanilla blind forest so I can't say.

About Persona, the caveat here is it couldn't be just a patch to update the vanilla edition, you would need to redownload everything. Royal has double the size of the vanilla edition and too many editions on the story, maps, menus, events, battles and of course graphics as well. It's something a little deeper than just changing and patching some files. What I agree that can be done is sell the Royal as an upgrade where you download it and It replaces the launcher of the standard edition, but it's essentially a new game meaning you can carry some things of the standard version but not everything (in the cause you have your saves and gaming data saved either in cloud or in the console). I don't know if Playstation allows it because I can't think any game that used it before (although is not technically impossible and seems something quite easy to implement)

Dragon Quest is even deeper because the source code of the game is different, it uses Switch version as the base and upgrade models, animations and resolution accordingly. So indeed, it would be a case where you get a new game, download it and after installing it the launcher of the vanilla version become inactive and you play the definitive edition then. 

You did get a complete game back then, but the games were typically much smaller, and even when factoring in DLC, they were still more expensive back then.  

You're that $60 a year to play online is a new expense, relative to the time we're talking about here. But, you get online play for that. There was no online playback then.

All that other shit you mentioned, microtransactions and the like, it's completely voluntary. I have never spent a single penny in any video game buying in-game currency or on any sort of microtransactions, and I've been gaming since 1982.  

It's not surprising that Wolfenstein 3D fans wanted to play Doom.  However, Doom was a much more popular game.  It definitely sold a lot more.  Also, I had never heard of Wolfenstein 3D until years after it's release.  But I couldn't escape Doom when it was a new game.  So many people were talking about it, and it was not the people I normally considered gamers.  Not only did it sell a lot, but many times more people were playing the free shareware.  Doom had reached a casual fanbase that Wolfenstein had not.  The PC was not really known for having good action games before the FPS genre emerged.  Doom was played by people who had a PC but weren't into either the non-action PC games at the time, and they weren't into console or arcade games either.  It had reached a new set of gamers.

This is not too different from WoW.  I am sure there were some hardcore MMO players that wanted to play WoW when it released.  But WoW reached a subscriber base far beyond what previous MMOs had.  Most of these were casual players who had never tried an MMO before.

Ask WarCraft III players if they're happy that the old version got delisted after the Reforged version came out...

Are they ever going to fix that game?