I won't have a discussion where you can make assumptions and my generalizations about corporate business practices are forbidden.
If your generalization itself were forbidden, then I'd not have replied.
The thing is we are talking about one specific company - we have to establish if the generalization applies. What scraps of information I have suggest not. If you've got a scrap of information that suggests otherwise, then we're good to continue. Otherwise, we kind of lump up on one man's suppositions against another, and there's not much more to be said.
For some of the rest - "middle class strength" and what is appropriate to support it, seem to me to be a large policy/political thing, not relevant to this specific case - WotC is not going to be a major support of the middle class any time soon, and I'm not going there.
I can, however, elaborate on my last comment, which is practical and industry-specific, rather than political, and maybe that can give us some fodder....
As I said, WotC is not in a business that lends itself well to steady-state staffing in the long term, especially in the RPG quarter. The life-cycle of the product lines just don't seem to behave that way in practice, what with markets getting quickly saturated, and production heavily weighted on the creative end.
What I mean is this - steady-state staffing makes all kinds of sense for industries that have a pretty steady stream of very similar productions. There's a pretty constant demand for toasters, so you can staff up to the level where you're meeting that demand.
Demand will fluctuate a little bit, and there's some cost to you if you overproduce. So long as you don't overproduce too much, you can just call that a cost of doing business. If demand really drops, you do need to cut staff. But, really, toasters are probably pretty steady-state.
Look, however, at the movie industry - they aren't in a steady-state production business. They're instead a project-oriented business, where each movie is a project, and handled like its own business venture. They don't usually keep a huge horde of production capacity on staff. Instead, they staff up for a particular production, contracting individuals and other companies on for the work, and when their phase of the production is done, those people are let go, and they're off to other projects.
In many ways, RPGs are rather more like movies than toasters. You don't do a string of RPGs off an assembly line (unless you're the printer, I suppose). Instead, you have a major project to produce some Core Rules. Once those are done, you don't need nearly as many people, and you might well need different people for the different approaches called for in different kinds of supplements and adventures.
You may want to change creative directions as the product line continues on - for the toaster business, you don't notice that, because the design department is tiny compared to the production lines. But for RPGs, the bulk of the people are in the creative end, so a change in creative direction may well mean a major staffing change.
As a practical matter, I'd expect churn in any artistic/creative commercial venture. Heck, in the fiction publishing business, the creative capacity is almost never in the form of permanent employees of the publisher - it's *all* contract work there.
Folks will bring up Paizo - to me, they took lucky advantage of a unique situation, and jumped over a major portion of the product line lifecyle, and so are a bit of a special case. Let's see if they do it differently when they get around to doing their own rules from the ground up.
