I'm glad it's gone, the focus should be on the characters at our table, not Ed Greenwood's.
Vampire had to do the same thing with a version change, the metaplot was strangling what could happen in games, because anything of a certain level of visibility would be 'dealt with' by characters of far greater power than the players.
I'm frankly just bored of all things Faerun. I want bonkers crazy worlds. Not the diluted bloodline of a Tolkien homage.
I know it's a frequent viewpoint on these boards ( as in "no settings, no metaplot, please"), from certian people, but I disagree. Detailed settings and ongoing metaplot might be more restrictive (not necessarily), but it provides a lot of stuff for making one person interested in the game and setting.
WW is recently planning to bring back the metaplot in the new edition of WoD. Before that, when Onyx Path planned the new edition, they wanted to move on the metaplot and setting, from the metaplot-agnostic point of the 20ths. NWoD, with all its glorious sandox-iness were never as successful as CWoD, never got as big a following base and the latter maintained a lot of it even during the times when it was cancelled and only NWoD was runned.
Metaplot also provides stuff for ancillary products, like novels, video games, comics, etc. and a lot of people were came to the game from those. How many gamers could we thank to the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale Series? To the Dragonlance novels? For the sake of the flying spaghetti monster, to Drizzt??? I know they did a LOT to got me interested in FR, just as Dave Gross' novels did a lot to won me over for Golarion.
Sandbox is good and all, but it's not the ultimate saint grail of rpgs. Neither is ongoing story. They just scratch different itches and different people like them differently.
And yes, old books are good, I like them too, but no they aren't an ultimate substitute for new content, especially, when supposedly a lot of stuff happened between editions.
Also, TSR might overdid the settings and novels, but honestly, it was a much better time to be a D&D fan from my standpoint (although I came into it during the 3e era, but a lot of novels I read and other stuff came from that era, like the aforementioned computer games) because we've got great setting material and novels. Conversely, their recent publishing model just got me increasingly more and more
uninterested in the game, despite my initial enthusiasm for the system itself. The cancelling of the novel lines was the last drop, until that changes, honestly a new adventure book, or even a hardback Unearthed Arcana won't get my attention.