Careful with your evidence, there.The success of Pathfinder and retro-clones certainly demonstrates a viable business opportunity that WotC let others pick up by failing to keep ongoing support for classic D&D and 3.5, FWIW.
What Pathfinder demonstrates is a company smaller than WotC, which excels in an area they weren't finding profitable (ie, adventures), can succeed by supporting 3e-style D&D.
What the OSR demonstrates is a cottage industry producing older D&D compatible materials, often offering their materials free of cost, can keep doing so. Presumably because they have day jobs. This is not to knock the OSR, I've bought some great supplements, but that says roughly nothing about the economic realities faced by WotC.
This is misleading.5e is trying to do the same thing that simply re-printing and supporting old editions would do: capture revenue from fans of older editions.
What they're doing, rules-wise, is synthesizing several edition into a new one. Personally, that's what I want. I don't need reprints -- I have all the originals. Looking at 5e as merely a money-grab directed at fans of older editions misses a critical point: there are plenty of D&D fans who'd like a less complicated and faster playing version of 3e/4e or a more mechanically robust version of AD&D/2e -- ie, the kind of game WoTC is aiming for.
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