Couple of points...
1. I think people took it at face value that this was D&D... that the same stories and games they had told and run in previous editions would be playable with the new edition... I think this assumption (especially since it was also part of the 4e marketing, remember... "ze game remains ze same!"... makes me question whether 4e was intended to be this narrativist/story now/etc. game that you and others seem to classify it as. Or whether it was secondary effect. I lean towards a secondary effect of everything listed in that article since I just don't see the designers banking on indie design as carrying the type of numbers 4e needed... When compared to previously sold traditional D&D editions the numbers for indie games sold are a drop of water in a lake... why bet your new edition on that type of design?
I think 'indie design' vs 'traditional design' is a meaningless distinction when people are having fun playing games. There's nothing inherent about either type of game which makes it more or less popular than the other. So, that part feels wrong to me.
It may be that there were differences of opinion on the 4e team about exactly what game they were writing, that's possible and even likely. There may have been differences between the designers and the marketers, also likely. There may have been some thought of not wanting to go completely over into 'story now' without leaving the game capable of working in more traditional ways. We don't really know what exact discussions happened in that vein. I know that it IS a narrativistic game design, and a good game. I don't need to speculate on that!
I think a lot of what we did in previous editions CAN be done in 4e. Its done a little bit differently is all. I ran plenty of scenarios that I had outlined as possibilities in my old 2e games using 4e. Its still D&D in many fundamental ways.
2. I'll just say I enjoy Essentials and the essentials classes. While the class change may not have solved everyone's problems they certainly did make the game appeal more to me (along with some of the polish and the concise/compact nature of this sub-branch of the game). IMO, essentials actually delivers on making 4e a game that is good for introducing new people to the hobby, as well as serving casual gamers... in fact I will be starting up a secondary game using 4e essentials because of that fact. Now admittedly I don't discuss essentials much since it seems that many 4e "purist" have a pretty strong bias against essentials so that could contribute to why they aren't discussed (except un a mostly derogatory way) in most of the 4e venues online.
I just thought Essentials was kind of a waste of time and resources that could have been better spent on other things. The guy harps on the VTT not materializing, but couldn't they have spent the money that went into Essentials on making it a reality? I mean, what people call 'flaws in 4e' seems more like just basic business mistakes that came back to bite WotC.
Ultimately I don't think you can definitively say that it's clear Essentials didn't solve any of what players were concerned about... it released 2 years after the core books and I'm sorry but that's a long time to expect people to stick with a game they didn't care for... especially with a popular and readily available alternative in Pathfinder. I think perhaps if the 4e PHB had been a mix of the essentials and core book classes it woud have come of much better overall than it did... I think so, but at the end of the day it's all just speculation.
Yeah, I think Essentials missed some key things about 4e and it wouldn't have worked out. They needed to go FURTHER with it if it was going to succeed, not try to regress, which is what Essentials is really about.
I disagree here... Story Now is a particular set of techniques/playstyle that while including the traits you mentioned is not specifically necessary for a DM to run a game where he is reacting, adapting and telling a story. {Perhaps you see it that way because it's your preferred style (I also think this is why you and others were able to apply this to 4e) but it most assuredly is not necessary for a DM to include those things in his game.
Well, we had a LONG discussion of this in another thread, and I never saw anyone draw up a convincing picture for me as to how you would do that.
As for why it wasn't written all over the game... well I would think the designers/developers would have the best handle on the game they designed and I tend to think they didn't necessarily intend for D&D 4e to be run in that specific playstyle and thus why it wasn't promoted as such upon release. I think later they may have figured out it could work that way and tried to push that as a sort of retroactively applied default playstyle (especially since it had little in common with the default Pathfinder style) to try and slow the growing number of dissatisfied players...
I don't see where they did anything like that 'retroactively'. There's a lot of stuff in DMG1 which comes right out of classic narrativist game design and play toolbox. Its just not consistent and all clearly spelled out ABC there. DMG2 seems more reactive to me. It includes a lot of good advice for how to run the sort of weird 3-legged-dog that is the game you get when you take DMG1 literally. It makes that a MORE workable game, but the MOST workable configuration is, and thus would be, a story oriented one.
Well I'm not sure it was the "right" game... again banking on indie design (with the available data on it's market ) to make D&D a core brand of Hasbro doesn't feel like what they needed either.
I think there are reasons to doubt that 'story now' games will sustain robust product lines of adventures. OTOH 4e didn't feature a huge line of modules. It seemed like their strategy was more to make it easy for GMs to cook up stories. I'm not sure how that all fits together in the end. I do believe that some of what the article stated makes sense. The lack of a VTT hurt DDI and that was certainly meant to be a big part of their money strategy.