4E has their fans, and they're no less dedicated than fans of any other edition; they should have an SRD for their game of choice (ideally under the OGL, since I think it's still a worthwhile license; more so than CC, in fact), but WotC seems to be quite content to never seriously entertain that idea.
I really don't see whether or not 4e was liked as a question. Obviously it was (and still is), very much, by a good number of people. It just wasn't enough for WotC's financial goals at the time.
They could even outsource the work.
They could, but I don't see the current leadership at WotC being interested in the endeavor, regardless of how much (or how little) is required of them.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. We'll be lucky if we eventually get the 3.5 SRD under the CC.
Yeah, that whole "we're reviewing the older SRDs to make sure we don't accidentally release any of our IP (the way we did with the 5.1 SRD)" line always struck me as dubious. The older SRDs were literally nothing but Open Game Content, not like how the 5.1 SRD was a mixture of OGC and Product Identity. No such "review" should have taken this long.
Exactly. They said that to placate people. It largely worked, unfortunately.
Considering they have at-will cantrips, short rest recharge abilities, and daily recharge abilities in 5E's CC-BY SRD, it wouldn't take much to rebuild 4E. Just look at how Necrotic Gnome "rebuilt" B/X from the 3.5 SRD. Though I honestly think that was WotC not caring enough to go after them. Not sure that would be the case with a 4E clone. Where you'd run into issues is the super-tight maths of 4E. Reproducing charts whole cloth is probably not the greatest idea ever. Breaking down the math and rebuilding those charts, however...Hey, didn't Blog of Holding do a MM3 on a business card post? Why, yes...yes he did.
I was at a seminar this last Gen Con where a lawyer did an overview of what the Open Game License did and didn't do. He covered a lot of basic ground about legalities before he got to the OGL specifically, and at one point had a slide that talked about the inability to copyright mathematical processes (as opposed to the artistic expressions thereof). To illustrate that, he had a listing of f(x) = (y-10)/2, asking who knew what that was.
