I think the whole "Steam on the scene" thing also plays into the psychology. As in, there could possibly be a massive future AOC HD player base on Steam, so why invest the time practicing AOFE which might not even make an appearance in Steam.
One thing I really dig about AOFE just playing around with it is that it has a feature you can use to eliminate the spastic "jumpiness" of building units in AOC. That leaves more time to focus on the battle. In AOC say you have 4 ranges strewn about and to queue archers in each you have to cycle through each one, which jumps the screen everywhere and then you have to find your way back to where you were previously looking. In AOFE you can assign all 4 ranges to a single group number, and then just hit the group number once and the archer build hotkey a bunch of times and they get queued evenly throughout all four of the ranges in the group. And you can do that without having the screen jump away from the current battle.
One thing I really dig about AOFE just playing around with it is that it has a feature you can use to eliminate the spastic "jumpiness" of building units in AOC. That leaves more time to focus on the battle. In AOC say you have 4 ranges strewn about and to queue archers in each you have to cycle through each one, which jumps the screen everywhere and then you have to find your way back to where you were previously looking. In AOFE you can assign all 4 ranges to a single group number, and then just hit the group number once and the archer build hotkey a bunch of times and they get queued evenly throughout all four of the ranges in the group. And you can do that without having the screen jump away from the current battle.