Playing a game where im forced to go down the blood sacrifice puts me off but I respect the developers for sticking to the authenticity of both history and the mythology. We should all strive to be better people but not at the expense of rewriting history, especially as that tends to create unrealistic perspectives of how evil the societies we do study look (nazi Germany or the Atlantic slave trade are not unusual historically). A game that omits such history would make me far more uncomfortable than one that explores it.
Maybe they can go down the civ4 route and have a toggle that disables that component so that players are consciously choosing to omit it and can focus on the city building.

Edit: even better, have an expansion where you play the rebels that finally overthrow them and do their best to not then die of mass plague. . . . Unfortunately stuck between the aztecs and foreign disease and conquistadors there weren't alot of realistic alternatives.

A few hundred years later, the story goes on....

Devlog: Terraforming

Neue Spielszenen und Veröffentlichungsdatum
New Gameplay Footage and Release Date Announcement

the blue blood barriers put you off ?