Good question and I'm curious how the poll comes out, mainly because I'm always surprised with how seriously people take the lore, even to the point of being upset when something changes significantly, or the degree to which some want things to change to their liking. When I see that, I feel like I'm listening to a foreign language. It just doesn't figure into my mindset or approach, which is viewing the lore as a toolbox to pick and choose from.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about changes to other non-D&D shared IP?
I think it's the "shared" element that is really what's going on here. We were invited to enter and play in the same world as others, able to take our PCs (or DM additions) and have them continue in continuity forever...
And then when official lore changes it invalidates that sense of belonging, because we can no longer have both continuity and be a part of the shared world. Either we end our stories and retire our world so we can be on the same page as new players, or we stick with it and force new players who may want to join our game to decide whether they want to have a sense of belonging with just our group and our obsolete lore, or with the general body of new D&D players.
It is annoying to me to have to demand that choice of anyone I might invite to my game, but I am forced into it because of official lore changes.
It's understandable when limited appropriate changes are made to be more inclusive, and it's also fine to add new stuff (like new campaign settings). But many of the revisions are just done for the sake of creative alteration and disenfranchise those like me who prefer to maintain an older D&D continuity.
Now, one way around it would be to prominently support each edition's take as separate continuities that exist in alternate multiverses. That would mean acknowledging their existence and probably giving them names, (Faerun2, Oerth Prime?). We currently have plenty of adaptive sidebars in the text (like advice for setting adventures in different worlds), and there is no reason we couldn't have sidebars mentioning that sort of stuff also. So even if 5e's take is presented as the default, it might say something like "If you are playing in Oerth Prime, replace dragonborn NPCs with humans and half-orcs...In known multiverses other than the Dawn War and [5e default], tieflings have various fiendish origins, widely variable traits, and tend to be extremely rare on the Material Plane. You can represent this mechanically by applying the variations from SCAG and MToF as the defaults and have them represent a variety of origins, not just the ones specifically mentioned...In Planescape Alpha and Beta as well as [list of multiverses], Ravenloft is a demiplane that exists within the Deep Ethereal Plane, though it may have connections to the Plane of Shadow...". To clarify, I'm not saying that the entire list of changes from the different continuities should be described everywhere in new 5e books. Rather, the existence of these other multiverses should just be mentioned regularly when new takes on lore are presented in 5e books, with a few salient examples. So in the new dragon book, when presenting the First World, they could also mention in a sidebar other origin stories that may not be compatible and the multiverse continuities they are part of. They can even mention suggestions on how to put the First World into those continuties if you want to. If a revised set of core books came out, that should also be mentioned in them some of the introductory or campaign design chapters (similar stuff is already done in the 5e core books, but it would need to be expanded a bit to handle this). Alignment could be presented in that same manner, with the PHB not including it as part of character creation, but with brief notes about it existing in various forms in some multiverse, and then the different multiverse takes and their significance expanded in the DMG. This isn't hard, really just an expansion of what the core 5e books have already done, and would resolve my frustrations. As it is, the approach taken with most edition changes has been one of disenfranchisement and exclusion towards those already invested (socially and financially) in a shared world in service to individual designers' artistic visions. I would think in today's world, that would be at least considered slightly problematic, and hopefully it's just a matter of it not really having come to general consciousness yet.
A bit with 1E and 2E, but less after that. Mainly because I maintained the things I used from 1/2E through 3E and beyond. I still use the age categories for "races" from 1E for example. I have alignment languages for liturgical purposes, not daily communication. It's little things like that that are built into my campaign / world (I have used my own home brew setting from the beginning) that are pretty much permanent. I have built my world around some of the peculiarities of D&D and worked to explain them.
