I wasn’t trying to tell you what the Primal spirits are. I was noting that the wilden are written as a manifestation of nature itself. The details of whether the writeup mentioned primal spirits or not is irrelevant.
However, I do remember their lore including specific primal spirits, whether that was in the first writeup or not.
Maybe they were expanded in a Dragon article. (Or a forum post...)
not at all the point I was making. Making wood woads or myconids PC races would require changing them, not just adding to them.
Worked just fine for orcs and hobgoblins and goblins and drow.
And humans really. Since NPCs don't use the same statblocks and PCs. There's no reason a PC version has to be identical to the monster.
Heck, even in 4e they also did a dryad racial write-up. That would work just fine in 5e.
I don’t care what the stats are. This reads like you literally just saw the word “stats”, assumed what I was talking about, and responded to that.
I said that I’d rather have a new race, thematically, than a rebuilt existing monster race, and even if we were getting treants and myconids and wood woads, I’d still want wilden included as well, because they’re substabtially different from them. They aren’t even plant people.
They’re wild spirit people who can take on aspects of nature and the seasons. There is no other player race like them, and being new doesn’t mean they’re “slapped on”.
I'm just not a fan of some brand new race that has no history in the 30 years of D&D just appearing and everyone having to pretend that they were totally there all along and are relevant to the history of the world.
There's plenty of interesting potential PC races from the previous forty years of D&D that haven't been updated along with interesting mythological beings that could be made into PC races without having to invent something whole-cloth. Odds are any "new" race won't be nearly as interesting or evocative or memorable as something people have enjoyed and seen again and again, or have been telling stories about for a thousand years.
(It's bad enough with the grung and the tortles, who no one has really cared about in 20 years, but at least they have some legacy aspects. Or the firbolgs who might as well have been a new race given how much they were altered.)
Now, as you say, being "new" doesn't make them "slapped on". That's true. Not being tied to anything else in the game is what makes them "slapped on". They're not an integral or connected race. The game and setting doesn't suffer for their absence. They don't fill a hole in the lore or niche. (As you say, they're not even *really* a plant race, just being one of several fey people.)
With the wilden they didn't even
pretend to make them part of the history, having them recently appeared in the world. Suddenly there was all these plant people running around. Like in a MMO following an expansion where a new race is added, and suddenly the demographics of the world shift overnight. They couldn't even be bothered to justify a backstory for them or work them into the lore and just handwaved something about the Far Realm triggering a reaction in the Feywild causing Wilden to emerge. Why now and not sometime in the previous 100,000 years? Because reasons.
Which makes about as much sense as them having two genders. (But then 4e slapped breasts onto dragon-folk and a living crystals so a plant-fey creature shouldn't be any different.)
Yeah, I'm sure they have some fans. But so did the illumians and raptorans in 3e. But not everything in past editions needs to be updated.
And the content that is updated can typically be improved. Made more relevant and connected. Reimagined.
One of these things is not like the others. 
