What exactly prevents you from playing without essentials? Not to mention, that every single change was for the better?
Yeah, that was my question. Especially considering all the chicken little "there will never again be support for non-Essentials classes!" doomsaying has been amply disproven (and I notice WotC got zero credit for doing exactly what they said they would and continuing to support everything). Beyond that lumping everything that happens to use some sort of Essentials-like power progression together seems odd to me. There's a pretty decent range of different classes within that 'box'. It seems hard to me to lump the Thief, the Warpriest, and the Mage together, they're all rather different and even if some players dislike the 'on rails' style of the Thief and Slayer there's no reason to dismiss the Warpriest at the same time, which has a lot more options.
I don't think the vast majority of the audience really cares that much one way or the other about Essentials. The game I started last month has a Cavalier, a Mage, and 2 PHB1 characters in it (ranger and rogue). I notice that the Cavalier's lack of a daily option seems a little limiting, but the person playing the character seems perfectly happy with it.
I'm not sure EXACTLY what WotC said about settings, but I kind of doubt they ever said they would never ever again ever provide the slightest support for, or set new products in, any of the currently released settings. All I remember them saying was that each setting would have 2 books and an adventure. Maybe somewhere someone said that would be IT absolutely and without exception nothing else, but I kind of doubt it. FR has always been a rather heavily supported setting in any case. It probably IS pretty popular and given how 'kitchen sink fantasy' it is it doesn't seem surprising at all to me that they would use it as a backdrop. There's a lot of depth of history and background in FR, so it makes a pretty good place to put more story-intensive products like Neverwinter. They could have used PoL and recreated a whole lot of background to support all the conflict and whatnot involved, but why would you if you could just leverage decades of existing lore in FR?
I don't see where it particularly shows some kind of desperation to use your existing IP assets efficiently when you make up new stuff. Everyone around here likes 4e pretty well. I kind of think it has a different kind of audience than previous editions where pretty much everyone would just switch eventually though. That probably does make WotC nervous. Lots of people seem to play 3.5 happily, but IME they also play 4e and all I ever hear about it is "Oh, 4e, that's a great game to play that's different from 3.5." which is kinda true. Aside from a couple of FLGS grognards nobody seems to care one way or another about it. I think 4e is seen more as an alternate take on D&D perhaps than as the linear evolution of the game. Maybe that's a bad thing (for WotC), but I'm not sure. I think there is just always going to be a kind of equilibrium between 3.5, PF, and 4e, and maybe other D&D variants. Essentials might not have really been enough of a variation on 4e to have mattered much, but it seems odd to me to say that it 'wrecked' anything.