The D500 is a great product but its presence in the lineup lead to Nikon introduding a slightly crippled D7500 (with no Ai metering, no second card slot, and no vertical grip option).
For some reason though, Canon products seem to sell really well despite of this ... so maybe the way online discussions represent people's feelings about products and what goes on in the actual purchase decisions are different.
There are two reasons online discussions do not represent purchasing decisions. One is that camera companies manipulate internet discussions in their own interest - some ineptly (Nikon), some very cleverly (Sony). The other is that people involved in internet discussions are atypical. People on this forum, eg, like manual focus lenses, and value metering with Ai lenses, but we are a very small minority - that is why MF lenses are cheap.
You cannot say that Nikon has a strategy of crippling consumer cameras based on things they either have not done (the D7500 does
not have "no Ai metering", with Ai lenses it meters centre-weighted or spot only and only in M mode) or that are perfectly reasonable, like removing the second card slot, let alone things you imagine them doing, like putting a penta-mirror in the D760.
The modal number of lenses bought by dSLR owners is 1, and the mean is 1.5,
including the kit lens: most people who buy a DX Nikon camera will never buy a lens other than the kit lens. For those who do, it is overwhelmingly likely that it will be AF-S. Here is a graph of interchangeable lens sales since 1965 (all brands). Sales were steady at about 5 million units a year from 1980 until 2003,
then they took off (
https://photographylife.com/a-few-thoughts-about-the-camera-market/). As many lenses were sold in 2012 as in all the years between the introduction of AF-D lenses and the introduction of AF-S. Removing the ability to AF with AF and AF-D lenses just does not affect a lot of people. Sure, Nikon has always valued backwards compatibility - and they evidently still do, because the D7500
is compatible with AF-D lenses, and there is no reason to suppose the D760 will not be.
Why, exactly, do you need two card slots? Card capacity has gone up much faster than file size: when SD cards were introduced in 2000 the maximum capacity was 2GB, and a D70 produced files about 5MB (= 400 shots per card), so there was a reason for two slots. By 2006, when SDHC cards were introduced, maximum capacity was 32GB and the D80 gave you file sizes up to 10MB (=3200 shots per card); when SDXC was introduced in 2009 maximum capacity was 2TB, and the D7500 will probably give you file sizes up to 40MB (=5000 shots per card). Sure, you can put RAW files on one card and JPEGs on the other,
if you shoot RAW + JPEG,
and if you don't upload all your files onto the same computer having them on separate cards is handy, but why would you do that? The same is true of the vertical grip: a D70 gave you 250-400 shots per charge, but a D7500 will give you 1200, so many fewer users need to carry extra batteries (it's different for a mirrorless camera, of course).
