I'm surprised that so many comments talk about "too many draws in classical chess problem" as just yesterday we just finished Tata Steel that was a terrific tournament with plenty of decisive games (84 out of 182) and even most of the draws were thrilling games. During commentary, GM Naroditsky mentioned that he asked past World Champions Anand and Topalov about influence of Magnus Carlsen on the game and both responded with "people have stoped offering draws in many different types of positions where 10-15 year ago they would shake hands and go home" [1]. Additionally modern computer analyses show that even dead drawn positions can be won if opponent makes slightest inaccuracy and players do try to capitalise on that often.
Maybe World Championship matches format needs some tweaking. Draws are much more common there as losing one game can easily mean losing whole match and players are extra cautious.
So the majority of games were draws. Do you really think that would be accepted without appeal to tradition? If you released a new game with so many draws, people would call it broken. If a minor rule tweak can reduce the draw count without substantially changing the feel of the game, it seems to me the common sense thing to do.
Too many draws is not a new criticism. Capablanca believed in the risk of "draw death", in that the majority of grandmaster games would eventually end in draws. He proposed a change to chess boards introducing two new pieces, the archbishop and the chancellor.
He wasn't the first to propose these sorts of changes (see the Wikipedia article).
In 1925, his comments on why he proposed these things is as follows:
"I spoke with Dr Tartakower, a great master and also a friend of mine, and he published, in very condensed form, my ideas on certain reforms that I believed it would be appropriate to make in chess. I told him that previously in various newspapers and magazines things had been attributed to me which I had never said, and this seemed to me a good opportunity to clarify the facts and to expound the only modifications that I really considered appropriate, while at the same time clarifying that it was untrue that I had ever declared that chess had reached its limit and that to draw was easy. It is of course easy to understand how much has been written and said on this matter. In reality, what I have heard and read on it demonstrates that I have not been understood."
"...In reality, today there exists, as it were, a separate form of chess, which is understood only by the most select of the great masters, and which very often relies on a highly-developed technique which already today threatens to make talent equal to genius; that would make chess rather similar to what the game of draughts is today. Thus despite the old history of chess and the thousands of books written on chess played on a 64-square board, it is necessary to avoid what would undoubtedly be a disaster. In order to prevent, for a few centuries at least, technique from again becoming such a dominant factor, I have suggested increasing the field of operations."
Maybe World Championship matches format needs some tweaking. Draws are much more common there as losing one game can easily mean losing whole match and players are extra cautious.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sK2IWnOfFuY