5e will sell, no doubt. Whether or not it'll meet Hasbro's inflated expectations. But what it won't do is change the industry in any way, certainly not for the better. It's simply too reactionary, too desperate to play it safe and too fixated on being just like the good, old editions.
There's no sign Hasbro has inflated expectations this time around. The little we've heard from that quarter suggests that the policies that led to the unrealistic goals that 4e failed to meet are gone, and that WotC is now treated as a single business unit - one that, with the ongoing success of CCGs, has nothing to prove. 5e has a free ride on the business side. It doesn't have to try to better the performance of past eds by being innovative or 'better,' so it can safely rest on the D&D name and just not rock the boat. Which it's doing pretty well, really.
which seems to be a pretty one-sided view of the edition war; an awful lot of vitriol ran the other way too,
The edition war was a pretty one-sided conflict. Still, it wouldn't have been a 'war' if the defenders hadn't shot back at times.
Even were the character completely balanced with the others, what system is going to stop the player from using a suboptimal weapon or suboptimal tactics?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, here. Can someone willfully choose to be in effective? Sure. They can stand in a corner and do nothing. That doesn't mean a game where a player who builds to a great concept ends up with a character little more effective than the one standing in the corner, while one who cynically optimizes gets a character that can annihilate deities with a twitch of his little finger isn't a terrible game.
Balance is a very real quality that games have. The only reason to /want/ an imbalanced game is so that you can leverage that imbalance to ruin the game for others.
[qoute]
Not for me. I would like at some point to get to play Thog, in character, and Thog not know anything about "dailies". Thog maybe hit harder and wilder, but that extent of Thog thought about tactics.[/quote] Not exactly hard to do that kind of character, is it? In 3e, you'd play a barbarian, and use a daily (EX) ability to Rage. In prior editions he'd've been a fighter and unable even to do that. In Essentials, he'd be a Slayer and use Power Attack (an encounter resource) to hit harder and wilder, and, before that, in 4e, a Battlerager fighter and use powers like Brute Strike to hit harder and wilder.
So, if your concept is a simple character who hits things with a big weapon, you were good. If your concept cast spells, but you weren't ready for a complicated character, your options were a lot more limited. In most editions, limited to 'none.' In post-Essentials 4e, though, you could've had an Elemental Sorcerer who just blast things, and occassionally blast them harder with Elemental Escalation. Not much, but it'd've been a start it if hadn't been in the last book to introduce class options....
Except that AC, saves and a whole bunch of other features worked the same across all classes in the other editions. Certainly the claim that you must learn any non-4E edition of D&D de novo with any new class is silly.
Play a 1e fighter, what mechanics do you use? Well, you pick out armor and weapons that affect your AC and damage/attack, you roll to hit a lot, you roll damage, you take damage a lot, and you get healed by the cleric a lot. You occasionally make a saving throw. Magic-user? You automatically 'know' some spells, you try to find and 'learn' others, your AC isn't determined by armor, the damage you do with your spells isn't determined by weapons, you have only a few spells/day, so managing them is critical, each spell does something different, not just a different amount of damage (though that too). The overlap is hps and saves. That's basically nothing. Yes, it's virtually re-learning the system. My point was merely that you were learning a new class from scratch, not virtually the whole system, though.
How much difference the homogenized classes of 4E really make, I don't know;
The common AEDU class structure was a solid framework for balance and made learning and understanding the game much easier. It was a big enough difference that edition warriors felt the need to attack it with false and misleading labels like 'homogenized' or 'samey' - or even outright lie and decry it as "fighters casting spells." (Ironic aside: in 5e, fighters actually /do/ cast spells - Eldritch Knight being a Fighter sub-class.)
A new edition means that new material isn't coming out for their game, that new copies of books are going to be harder to find and that new players are less likely to be familiar with the old system or interested in learning it. A new edition really hurts those who don't like the new edition.
That was true for AD&D fans when 3.0 came out, and it's /very/ true now for 4e fans with 5e coming out.
Ironically, the one time absolutely wasn't true - that is, when the fans of the old edition were able to look forward to a constant stream of new material, supporting material, complementary games that would introduce new players to the same system, and even virtual-reprint 'clones' - was the one time those fans had the most violent and destructive reaction against the new edition. That reaction was so destructive, we call it the edition war.
