I guess we will never see an end to modules lifting this or that from older stuff. Which I'm not exactly against - you see, most people probably, definitely including me, never got the chance to play it all. And I'm of no mind to go back to 1e or convert it all by myself just to give it a try. I mean, they have tons of material to dig through.
I would personally welcome if they had a bit more diversity - or do two AP at the same time. Every time one comes out I don't happen to like I'm stuck waiting half a year to see if they hew closer to my tastes next time. Dinosaurs and an undead menace in Chult isn't exactly my thing. Might still buy it for stuff to lift.
Lucky for them all groups I play in are super slow. It took us ages to finish the starter set or CoS. Also, lots of homebrewn stuff, not exactly waiting for WotC to fill my needs, anyway. Still, updated "Dark Sun" or any other setting stuff would be welcome by now. I'm not hating on the FR, it's fine with me, just a second set of APs set elsewhere would have been fine. I get it that it would not be easy to maintain a second set of top authors just for pushing AP, but they did not need that when out-sourcing them early on to friendly 3rd party publishers, either.
I'm at this point not expecting any truly new stuff from WotC. It's a hunch, but it has a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to it. I mean, most adventures drop names one way or the other. Another setting contest like the one that gave us Eberron would be cool, though.
Not exactly excited about "Xanathar's" either but maybe it pimps up some classes I've not been too excited about in their PHB versions. I guess I am glad that they are not swamping us with options like 3e and 4e did. No DMG2 or PHB3 either. That part of their publishing policy works for me.
I could get behind an AP that does not start with lv1 and with one that goes to lv20. I'm not into restarting play at lv1 or lv3 or missing out on most of a book's content. CoS was an exception in that even at lv7 for our starting characters (from a homebrewn campaign) it managed to stay challenging. It's nice for players to beat "big baddies" - and I have no issue with beating Strahd "so early" because beating Strahd with empowered items has been part of the module since 1983. But if you always end up beating baddies of that caliber at around lv12 then DMs are really challenged to come up with a true villain for lv20 if they are supposed to make their own endgame. Not saying you always have to end with a boss, but if all the cool villains already happened and you have to set up your own uber-baddie after defeating those everybody knows - that's a tall order. I mean, the whole point of publishing AP is that there are people who have no time for prepping a whole AP themselves, including setting up a future villain. All these people get to do right now is... start over and over again. I mean, just another "Elder Evils" like for 3e... that was a good book and you could end a campaign with quite some bang for the buck.
At this point I have almost left as many books on the shelf as I have bought.
