Frankly, you're the only RPG company in the world with the history, tradition, and corporate backing to truly move the needle forward in RPG game design.
I submit that there
is no universally-recognized "forward" direction in RPG design. I don't think the development of RPG mechanics has ever taken place on some sort of easily-measured linear scale. It's all over the place, this huge, chaotic, spidery
thing with abominable tentacles reaching hither and yon every which way.
There is
not clearly-defined forward progress in gaming design, and there never will be--and not simply because of the fact that its evolution isn't at all simple and linear. You're never, ever going to get everyone to settle on a single definition of exactly what constitutes forward progress. What might be Grand Progress to you might be a Complete and Utter Step in the Wrong Direction to me. What is a "mediocre RPG" to you might be my favorite game in the world.
I think there
does indeed come a point of wide-open weirdness after which D&D is no longer D&D. For me personally, it's not a firmly delineated boundary so much as a fuzzy patch into which the game wandered at some point in the lifespan of 3E and emerged looking less like classic Western literary medieval-esque Fantasy and more like the spiky-haired, emo-kid bastard lovechild of Dragonball and Mad Max/Junkyard Wars.
I don't think it's rude to ask that people who are more attracted to the latter go seek something like Exalted--if you don't like the classic elements of D&D, why are you playing it? There are other games out there that cater to your tastes. Since there
are other options for you out there, why are you trying to spoil the fun of those of us who
do like D&D in its classic form, with all its familiar trappings? I don't get it; it just seems overbearing and selfish to me.
It is impossible for D&D to be all things to all people. At some point the designers are going to have to realize that the direction they're taking the game is going to alienate one or the other extremities of the fandom. Some factions of gamers are
inevitably going to feel left out in the cold by the new version.