I can go along with Staffan's observations. To me, the playtest was too fast. It gave me the sense that Paizo was in a big hurry. If I tested anything, it was character generation. Yeesh, I'm tired of making PF2 characters and we're not done with Doomsday Dawn yet.
Yeah, we dropped it after the second adventure. We just didn't think it was any fun. Whether that was due to adventures designed to stress-test the system, or whether it was due to a poor system, I'm not sure - probably a bit of both.
I think Greylord's historical observations about rulebook sales will probably prove correct, but times do change.
Pathfinder is a little odd because the original impetus of making it was "People like the adventure paths we did first in Dragon and then as their own products after we lost the license. But we don't want to make adventures for 4e both because of the more restrictive license and because we don't like the rules, so we want to keep making 3e adventures. But it makes no sense to make adventures for a system that's no longer in print, so tweak 3e and release it as our own game." In other words, with Pathfinder the adventures drove the rules, not the other way around (at least at first).
But I see three main reasons for Paizo to release Pathfinder 2:
1. There are something like 17 hardback rulebooks for the system, plus 6 bestiaries, a bunch of Golarion-specific hardbacks, and approximately a zillion other books. It's getting pretty hard for Paizo to come up with new interesting things.
2. There are something like 17 hardback rulebooks for the system, plus 6 bestiaries, a bunch of Golarion-specific hardbacks, and approximately a zillion other books. That is
completely impossible to get a grip on as a player or GM, particularly when a lot of those zillion other books have player-oriented material scattered here and there. Archives of Nethys lists 40 different classes (plus 4 variant classes from Pathfinder Unchained, as well as the five NPC classes), and each class probably has at least a dozen potential archetypes - and that's before getting into feats and other customization.
3. The game has been out for 10 years. Pretty much everyone who was going to buy it have bought it, so they need a newer hotter model.