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Originally Posted by RogerWilco

Thank you for replying to me.

That's what forums are there for! It's not (always) us just blabbering about and ignoring others!

As I said, given the history WotC has with their various past software venues, I'm very reluctant to trust them to get it right this time. Not so much their initial effort, but more how long and well they'll support it during the entire lifetime of the product. They have a history with the interactive atlas, MasterTools/E-Tools, Gleemax, MtGO.

Yes, I know. I can't think of anyone that didn't have at least some skepticism. And I do not think that the the brilliant design and flawless implementation of Gleemax helped anything at all.

Well, that would be problem one. I'm not interested in 4e, until they have at least the Druid class included, so I'm currently not signed up for DDI.

Well, the playtest version will be up next week, apparently. Of course, it won't give you a full overview. But as long as you're not playing 4E, you won't benefit much from DDI, at least if you're interested in useful rules content. (Adventures can still be mined for ideas and maps, and other articles still contain "re-usable" fluff)

This would be an even bigger obstacle. If you use a Mac, do you have to pay less for the DDI as you can't use the Character Generator?

At the moment, it's cheaper for everyone. IIRC, once the Character Generator goes to all its 30 levels of character creation glory, DDI prices will go up. But anyone that ordered a subscription before that will automatically be upgraded without having to pay more.

So basically, there would be two ways to test the waters: Get the open Beta sometime in the next few months and see if you like it, or get a cheaper DDI access for 1 year, getting access to the closed Beta.

Beware: At the moment, all subscriptions come with an auto-renewal after they expire. At the moment, you would have to inform Customer Support that you do not want auto-renewal.

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My point was, that under the old SRD3.5, if you could not use or didn't want to use the tools provided by WotC (E-Tools), you could write your own. Through CMP, you could even buy the datasets legally for the books you owned. With the new system, you have no options, if you can't use what WotC provides, you're out of luck.
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Yes, that's a signifcant drawback, though since the generator actually looks solid this time around, it is "only" a drawback for non Windows users.

The way WotC pulled the plug on E-Tools and PCgen support almost overnight has left me with very little confidence that theyll do a better job supporting their new tools. "Once burnt, twice shy" I tihnk they say in America?

Well, so far the support looks good.

I think this one of the primary reasons for this is because they developed this edition with computer support in mind, meaning that the rules are apparently already fed into a database*. So apps just need to be updated from that database, which makes it a lot easier then having to hack all rules elements already created into a computer readable format.

Note that this is only the information I gleaned from the outside, it might be inaccurate. Maybe they just have hired 200 Chinese Captcha-Solvers for hacking in their rules into the databases.

*) Though I don't think this always means the rules can be also evaluated by a computer, e.g. there is a lot of text that requires human interpretation. But powers for example can easily be _relatively_ easy described in a format so that the computer can it least fill in some variables.