i think this has been the outcome every time i have seen BDD applied. when the only people maintaining the BDD suite are the developers, the situation can be improved by throwing away the human readable BDD layer and allowing the developers who are maintaining the test suites to use a real programming language with abstractions and composability.

that said, writing acceptance style tests directly in a real programming language with an appropriate layer of test-support library abstractions in that language, customised to whatever component is under test, can often be quite pleasant and productive.