The entire setting is based around a bunch of problematic and offensive forces being entrenched all over the setting and attacking you for trying to fix it. And your PCs being broken overpowered supers being the only reason they aren't all slaughtered.
I'm not terribly sure what you're arguing here. The post I answered for was saying that Dark Sun was a setting in which nobody could be good without being killed, and when I pointed out that's the setting was entirely built around opportunities for people to make a difference, now you're saying this is a bad thing? This seems like a bit of a circular argument. You can't really logically say that the only Real Dark Sun is overwhelmingly oppressive hopeless and so awful the the PCs are doomed if they try to make any change at all, and then complain that Dark Sun is too oppressive hopeless and awful and that the only good PCs who can survive there are superheroes. There's a middle ground. There's always been a middle ground, since the inception of the setting. It's a game setting, if it had no scope for genuine heroism, at all levels, it'd be a very poorly-designed one (which was one of my complaints about VRGtR).
And moreover, the initial few DS modules (Freedom and Road to Urik in particular) had the PCs playing second fiddle to the NPCs of the Prism Pentad. Which was absolutely dreadful adventure design, but in context of this conversation, rubbed it in that the PCs could NOT overthrow all the evils of the world alone, that small victories were still worth winning, and that allies and collective action and cooperation matter.
WOTC doesn't think there is enough money in either a purist or sanitized version of Dark Sun to bother. A literal TSR situation of a too niche product. If not for being the main setting vehicle for psionics, it likely would have been shelfed long ago.
Every time WotC runs a survey about legacy settings, by their own testimony, Dark Sun is at the top of the list of settings that people vote to bring back. Wotc even brought back
Spelljammer, remember, at that was far more of a minor niche setting than Dark Sun. I don't know about raw numbers, but at least in the context of legacy settings, Dark Sun is popular - more popular than either Dragonlance or Spelljammer, by WotCs owjn testimony.
Here's a thought experiment though. If DS came back in adventure form, avoiding the hot-button 'problematic' topics completely, would you be ok with it? This is what Dragonlance did, after all. DL always had its problematic areas, from the role of the good gods in the Cataclysm and the subsequent debates about the meaning of the word 'good' in context, to the portrayal of gully dwarves. So what did WotC do? They released a DL book, in adventure form, which contained pretty much all the play material you needed to run a DL game, but which carefully and deliberately navigated around the areas where old canon was a most uncomfortable fit with modern mores. And yeah, they retconned sufficiently to put women in the Solamnic Knights. but in the context of the setting that'd be like renaming muls as half-dwarves and deciding that bearing a mul child no longer kills a human mother. A small, low-hanging fruit change to a minor lore element that nobody would miss. If you want to run a DL campaign exploring the history of the Cataclysm, you have all the tools you need, but this approach saves WotC from having to commit to THEIR canon on the matter.
I reckon could, without too much trouble, put together a Dark Sun adventure outline that visited some or all of post-Kalak Tyr, Kemalok, the Obsidian Wastes, the Ringing Mountains, Guistenal, the giant islands in the Sea of Silt, the ruins of Yaramuke, Kurn, the Crater of Bones, Under-Tyr, the haunted remnants of vanished Kalidnay, and the Pristine Tower, without requiring the PCs run across institutional slavery at all (and if the PCs started in Tyr, I wouldn't have to bother supporting PC templars either, any more than SotDQ felt the need to support PC gully dwarves). The bad guy could be Dregoth, it could be a brand new defiler we'd never heard of, it could be one of Borys' kaisharga minions, it could be the templars of someone like Nibenay trying to loot Kalak's stuff, it could be an undead horror from the Obsidian Lands, it could be a psurlon brood, it could even be Tithian or Wyan/Sasha or something completely new. Simply stick 50 pages of player options, setting rules, and a brief gazetteer at the front of the book to give a general Athas mechanical toolkit, lay out an adventure with the rest of your pagecount, then leave individual playing groups to do what they want.
