I don't demand perfection from the rules (and god knows I've yet to write perfection so it would be hypocritical of me to ask it), but I think that is just no reason to have these mistakes. All of the things they were trying to do, like making it so you can draw and throw a bunch of javelins or daggers could have been done without breaking other things if they'd been more careful.
It would have taken more playtesting and editing, but the budget on that is trivial compared to the budget they spent on art or god knows what else. They could have gotten it for free if they just had not insisted on playing their cards close to their chest and actually used UA... and then actually read the comments for the UA instead of just looking at the total votes.
I don't think think the rules should be written for optimizers, but I don't think making them optimization proof has any cost besides straight up quality control. Most of the more problematic things were almost certainly not intentional changes, they were just makes.
There is just no benefit to me, as a player that doesn't want to exploit the rules, as a DM that doesn't want the rules exploited, or a homebrewer trying to write content for the game, in the rules being sloppy, and there's no good reason for them to be sloppy when are talking about a book that will probably sell a million copies and had a massive budget behind it.
The only ways I can see it ending up there are that they did not care, they ran out of time, or they don't understand the crunchy interactions of the rules. I would bet on them running out of time... but that's not a great place to be for was supposed to be the clean up edition of the rules that was going to be the last edition of D&D we'd ever need. Maybe that's not something you rush out the door unfinished.
I fully appreciate that many of the mistakes don't matter to many people. The same is true for 5e 2014. I don't really care that Conjure Animals is broken, because I just banned it and moved on with my life long ago. But it's also fair to say that if they are expecting people to upgrade from 5e 2014 to D&D 2024, it should probably strive to not have the same argument applied to it (that the DM can fix the jank).
And I really think people overstating how much of the problems are 'exploiting' the rules. Giant Insect reducing a creatures speed to 0 with no save or size limit and stopping everything from ghosts to dragons in place... and 70 hit points (more than double what it is supposed to have)... none of that is an exploit, it's just literally casting the spell as someone reading it would think it works. Sure, at least some of that might get errata'd but the book is already printed, and that's the version that will be in a lot of people's books. If they'd published that spell and actually listened to public comment, this would have been noticed immediately.
I don't think public feedback is good for finding the direction of the game, but it is extremely good at identifying the rough edges and sanding them down (as someone with a decent amount of public feedback on my content over the years... I can attest to that!); its a sandblaster that will tell you all the ways your rules fail and smooths things out. Too much can render your content boring and unoriginal, but too little can leave in obvious mistakes, exploits, and unintended combinations of rules. And these rules good have used a solid sandblasting.
