What exactly is wrong with wanting to be in full control of my D&D?
I want to be able to restrict or expand the game.
I want to be able to disallow arbitrary official sources, and allow arbitrary 3pp sources.
I want to have a game with 90% houserules.
I want to be able to play without a subscription or microtransactions.
I want to be able to play when the lights go out, or in a cabin in the woods, or in a third world country.
It's a game, for criminy's sake, not a wife or the CIA. I should be in full control of it!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
However, there are limitations inherent in that model that have to be recognized as well. Endless edition churn being the most obvious. As sales of more and more niche books continue to drop, you're going to get a new edition of the rules, necessitating buying the same core books over and over again.
I mean, it's not like this is limited to D&D. Pretty much every RPG out there, once it hits a certain level of success, starts down this path. They have no choice really. It's simply the reality of book sales.
So, while it's perfectly fine to want 100% control over your game, that control comes at a cost which is new editions every so often.
Digital has the advantage of not requiring new editions to be released as digital editions can simply be added on an changed. You don't need to buy Essentials - you can have pretty much everything from essentials in your DDI sub. When 5e comes out, it's very likely that it will simply add onto 4e rather than replace since that's the most economically feasible.
In fact, my prediction is that we won't see 5e all at once. We'll continue to see incremental shifts, like Essentials, every couple of years, all driven by continued subscriptions to the DDI.
