Hussar
Legend
We can bandy about hypotheticals all day long. I'm talking about what actually happened. The fandom got exactly what it demanded. The fandom doesn't then get to bitch about it. If you wanted WotC to be more open to creativity, then the fandom needed to ratchet the rhetoric WAYYY back and actually let them do original stuff.eh, they could survive with half the sales / the level of 4e sales, many companies do. No one strong armed them into pursuing the maximum number of sales
Who knows, maybe iterating on 4e would also have worked in the long run and gotten them over the hump
But, any time WotC tries to do anything even slightly original or innovative, the fandom slaps them down. So, again, what lesson would you take from that?