I happen to disagree. In my opinion, new Manual of the Planes is an excellent position, and a great source of information to a DM.
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There are no encounters, no introductory adventures, no notable NPC stats, and a very sparse monster section that doesn't seem to know what sort of monsters it should have. There aren't even maps of the Shadowfell or Feywild.
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That's probably because the planes are core concept in the D&D cosmology. The encounters for the planes are in the Monster Manual. As for introductory adventures - the planes become available in the middle of the heroic tier, and a lot of DM could reasonably restrict them to paragon tier, so it'd be hard to depict a sensible adventures. The 'what sort of monster' thing is built in into the system: immortals come from Astral sea, elementals from Elemental chaos, shadow monsters and some undead from Shadowfell, fey from Feywild. And as for maps... Maps of Shadowfell/Feywild would be maps of the natural world, which, as the
DMG says, shouldn't be already mapped. The world is yours, and so are the planes.
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Maybe it was a matter of having too much possible material that kept this book so vague. There are a lot of major places we would come to expect including details of the Astral Sea, the Elemental Chaos, the Shadowfell, the Faywild, the Abyss, and the Nine Hells. Unfortunately the book never gets into enough detail in any of these areas. Perhaps Wizards would have been better picking two at a time and focusing on them as they did with the Fiendish Codex series. A single book on the Shadowfell, for example, could be a lot more focused and a lot more usable.
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In my opinion there is a sufficient number of detail. Those are not campaign settings, but descriptions of the planes. One of the key concepts in the
4e settings is the Points of Light. Those places aren't terribly interesting, what's interesting is the kind of stories and battles told and fought on the planes. I feel that MotP4 fulfills this duty.
[quote]The Shadowfell section, for example, has a five paragraph, 3/4 page description of a being known as the Dread Emperor without any stat block to be found. How useful is that if I have to write up my own stat block?
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Because that way you can use Dread Emperor as a foe in an adventure for 1st level characters.
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