suggests that's exactly what they planned before the idea was nixed at the last minute by someone further up the food chain and they had to scramble to do a quick rewrite to file the serial numbers off.
They could not have gotten all the print books redone in time. If this was really a last minute change, Spelljammer would have been delayed. The printed books
already had "Doomspace" printed in them.
The Dark Sun monsters in the Astral Menagerie book, and thri-kreen in the main book.
Thr-Kreen are core 1E monsters, from the Monster Cards and Monster Manual 2. They're no more exclusive to Dark Sun than drow are to the Forgotten Realms. (And folks on these forums have tried to argue that drow are, indeed, something that should only belong to the Forgotten Realms, despite them debuting -- spoiler alert -- at the end of G3.)
And if WotC wants to visit a new hostile, John Carter-style world for an adventure, should they create entirely new monsters or just grab some from an established world?
Their presence automatically meaning "Dark Sun" is wishful thinking.
The brief appearance of the 'Athasspace' map on DNDBeyond before it was hurriedly yanked and replaced with 'Doomspace' with no explanation stinks of the online team getting given the old map and someone forgetting to update them when plans changed late.
Have you ever worked with an extended team? Someone's version always lags behind, and giving people temporary code names for items until a final version of a concept is worked out is standard operating procedure in the companies I've worked for.
One year ago: "It's not Athas, but it's Athas-like. Tell the artists that it's sort of Athas for their purposes, but don't do anything specifically Athas, like landmarks or flags."
Several months ago: "For crying out loud! You sent the temp map to D&D Beyond?"
If your Slack or Google Teams conversations don't look like this, I envy you, but this chain of events is not at all remarkable.
I have had to come down to the office in my pajamas on a Sunday morning and frantically argue with the production team on something I was working on because we -- as far back as 2008 -- had put something online that people were freaking out about that was supposed to have been fixed and I was trying to get it and the hard copy fixed before it went out the door in hours.
And why would D&D Beyond say anything? What possible explanation could they have said that the people who want to believe all this would have responded to?
And the description of Doomspace in the adventure basically reads as if someone was given the brief 'we've written an adventure in Athas but we can't use Athas and it's too late to rewrite, quick, come up with some quick background of an Athasy world that isn't Athas and hurry up about it, we go to print in 20 minutes'.
I sure hope no one sues the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs for creating a desolate world with arenas and half-dressed heroes and villains battling weird creatures.
This is an
old trope present in the original OD&D booklets, but largely ignored nowadays, since Barsoom isn't particularly popular after Gygax's generation.
Given the various ... controversial ... editorial choices around Spelljammer, from the initial decision to go with the three-skinny-book format that absolutely nobody asked for, to the various hadozee issues, this does not strike me as a project that was managed very well by Wizards. Given the way everything else went, I have absolutely no problems believing that some bright spark in WotC's creative department thought it'd be a grand wink-and-nudge joke to drop Athas into a black hole in a Spelljammer adventure, before some perhaps more seasoned and grizzled head saw the almost-completed manuscript at the very last second and screamed 'WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING???'
"I'm mad at WotC so I'm willing to believe the worst possible scenarios, even when it makes no business sense for WotC to have done so" shouldn't be a compelling argument to anyone.
Dark Sun is valuable IP. The fact that WotC keeps making attempt after attempt to get psionics to a place where the disparate crowd of Dark Sun fans want it demonstrates that.
The fact that someone at WotC
also likes Dark Sun and, when asked about what sort of worlds should be in the Spelljammer adventure, trotted out some Dark Sun-style content, should also not be a shock.
They're eventually going to pick a version of psionics, grit their teeth about the hue and cry that it's not the same as in 2E, and publish Dark Sun. (Probably not until after 2024, though, since they have a lot of stuff to do between now and then.) In fact, Dark Sun is extremely likely to come in the multi-book format, so that the psionics rules can be purchased separately on D&D Beyond.