There's a lot of discussion about a lot of things, but one thing I see a few times boils down to 'they couldn't have done any better this', and I think its worth looking at how they ended up with these problems.
Obviously there's the layoffs and deadlines which are self-imposed limitations, and obviously those have large impact. But there's a more fundamental reason even than that I think. D&D 2024 is not an iterative attempt to improve 5e 2014 so much as it is an attempt to rewrite without the problems it had previously.
To use an analogy, if they were programmers trying to fix a bug, rather than changing the code line by line to try to narrowly fix problems, they deleted the whole file and tried to write it again without the bugs. Anyone that has programmed for a large project and encountered some heavily commented esoteric barely working code class written by some long gone senior engineer will be familiar with that temptation, but also why you would never want to do that, because the end result is that you almost always end up with at least same amount of new different bugs as you run into all the edge cases and compromises the original author did. A lot of the oddities of 5e 2014 were trying to work around specific things, but as they wrote D&D 2024 they tried to fix the things about 5e 2014 people complained about, but not with an awareness for the things 5e 2014 was trying to work around. The easiest example is a shield no longer taking an action. Its easy to see why they thought was clunky and removed it, but that was there to stop something specific from happening, and removing it caused what is almost certainly a bug.
Each person will have to make their own decision if the list of things D&D 2024 fixes is better than the list of things it breaks, but my contention with it is that most of the things it broke were unnecessary to break if they just approached it differently. D&D 2024 should have either been a direct improvement to 5e 2014 with minimal compromises in breaking new things (a polish edition) or a 6e that brought some new approach in my opinion. I don't really think it would been have been that hard for D&D 2024 to be an uncontroversial improvement to 5e, but they included a bunch of stuff they never polled the public on, and a fair bit of that stuff turns out be rough.
Imagine how much better the reception for D&D 2024 would have been if they had just stuck to the changes that were more or less direct improvements. While someone like me may have problems problems with that since I don't like the power creep, I think we'd see a much more positive reception.
Obviously I don't have any market wide analytics, but another question I saw come up a few times was what the reception actually was. I actually went through all the various public polls I could find and summarized them together awhile (a few subreddit polls, half a dozen YouTuber community polls, a poll from this forum, a few decent sized Discord servers including mine), and came up the current totals of 29% of people are planning to switch, 34% of people are planning to stay on 5e 2014 and 36% of people are some flavor undecided or planning to switch to a non-5e game (the poll are options weren't all the same, so the groups aren't too detailed just broad categories). It varies quite a lot, with some communities at >50% switching, while some communities were <15% switching.
That said, while interesting, there's two caveats to that data. That data is before most people have the rules, so I suspect it more reflects the opinion their favorite influencer/creator that has rules in most cases, though those opinions tend to carry a lot of weight. Second, those are from very heavily invested in D&D communities. The average player is not on D&D forums, D&D subreddits, D&D discords, or D&D YouTube community posts. I would guess the actual number is that >50% of D&D players don't even know what D&D 2024 is.
Anyways, was just catching up on the thread and figured I'd chime in. I'm impressed this thread is still trucking right along >400 replies in. Lots of interesting stuff to read here (...even if a maybe 100 of those are debates on Grappling mechanics!). Perhaps I should add that to 'Carried Over Problems', since the main subjects of discussion (i.e. mounted grappling, if you need to drag creatures, etc) are the same between 5e 2014 and D&D 2024.
