Then why he publically spoke against low-fat diets, insulted harvard doctors trying to help people with heart issues by reducing saturated fats in their diets and still enthusiastically and without constraint promoted the idea that many people have unstable blood sugar and poor glucose tolerance and need will go anywhere to the point of developing eventually diabetes if they keep their low-fat nutrition?
Atkins was more interested in his work with real life patients than whatever book sale and he was maybe the only one who understood reactive hypoglycemia and glucose intolerance and saying to it more veggies would have not change the slightest the impact his book might have on mainstream and professional naysayers.

Rethinking vegetables and how not everyone tolerate very low level of carbs is not to me soft-pedaling his theories since those are not things that make his book less hardcore. The only way to soft-pedal his idea would have been to write and say that fat is dangerous, that people with heart disease need to consume maximum 10 grams of fat a day that grains are essential and that low-carb is an extreme measure for people who want to lose weight for vanity but that after losing weight one should go back to an healthy diet of 60% carbs.
And he never said such things. To me his 72 and 2000 books are both hardcore books that attrected huge criticism (which Atkins ignored anyway) and the differences in the new version are due to Atkins refination of his therapy and diet in decades of clinical practice with patients from all walk of life.