I guess some people don't like permadeath. But.. it's an essential feature of a game type called roguelike.
Why is it important for a game to be like Rogue?
Imagine people instead invented "pacmanlike" genre, and decided, for some strange reason, that success of any pacmanlike game will not be measured by popularity, but likeliness to the original Pac-Man. People would then argue how any good pacmalike must have three lives and four ghosts, because those are the essential features of a game type called pacmanlike.
Think about it, it's insane. Roguelike is not a genre, it's a semantic blunder, ambiguous, meaningless and non-existing word. It's a bunch of arbitrary restrictions, a measure not of any quality, but just plain similarity. And do we really need any more Rogue clones, really?
But if you already must to be remaking one and the same game for 30 years, then at least pick up a better version to imitate than ugly PC one. Macintosh and Atari ST versions from 1985 have graphic tiles, mouse support and even few sounds, they are still more advanced than most roguelikes of today, it's embarrassing.