Games like the Neverwinter computer game, the Ravenloft board game, and even Inn Fighting card game are ways to introduce people to D&D. The truly dedicated, the number crunchers, the folks who ilke reading 500-page tomes are the ones who survive on into the tabletop hobby.
D&D tabletop, as designed, is niche. It can't be anything else. It's not approachable, it's not sexy, it's not good for someone random to pick up and run for others, and even the "run for others" requirement already sinks half of the proposition. Tabletop RPGs are just a hard sell, so they require that "older cousin".
Any version of D&D that actually was approachable, that could be picked up and easily played by a group of newbies without the three tomes, hundreds of pages of rules and charts? People would complain about that, say it wasn't D&D.
They could certainly do a better job on the starter and Basic front though, yessiree.