The PHB is improved with better balance, stronger concepts, and less caster supremacy. It's still a greatest hits album - but moves from a 6/10 to a 7/10 for me.
The DMG is vastly better than the 2014 version and actually starts out by teaching people how to run a game - and doesn't teach them the actively harmful notion that the first thing you should do is create your world ... and the second thing is create your multiverse. It's a book I'd be happy pointing new D&D 5e DMs at, moving it from a 2/10 to 7/10, possibly even an 8/10
The 2024 rules, and the shallow extent that any kind of guidance is provided, does nothing from what I can see to aid or teach, world building at all.
And given just how bad traditional D&D world building has been I can only see this as an active and significant improvement.
Are the Gods detailed? What of their faiths?
And by the time you're asking this second question you have already blundered through an entire field of rakes in your world building - and I think the only D&D setting with the arguable exception of Dark Sun to not have tripped repeatedly is Eberron.
D&D's official setting is monotheist; the faiths are in general a really weird type of competing monotheisms.
Are there actual cultural differences outlined, and how are those mechanically represented if every culture has the same Charlatan, Farmer, and Hermit.
So what I'm hearing is that you hate D&D. Where the 2014 PHB was the first PHB to have actual background rules that aren't simply your race is your culture and we live on the planet of the hats.
And every culture may have farmers - but the proportion of farmers in 21st century culture is very different worldwide to in the 16th century. Every culture has charlatans and it takes similar basic skills to be one in any culture - but are they folk heroes using wits as the little guy taking on the powerful or the lowest of the low as utterly dishonourable? 5e doesn't hard code this but does encourage the player to ask the questions.
It's a low bar but in terms of sociological worldbuilding (which is the actually important part), just by having backgrounds 5e leaves pre-4e in the dust. (4e backgrounds came out about a month after the ultra-rushed PHB).
Tell me, as a 'I just got my first D&D Book, 2024 PHB' who is Gruumsh, and what does he believe and ask of his followers?
Ask your DM - and even if Gruumsh is a thing in this setting. I thought your problem was a lack of world building guidance, not that D&D wasn't enforcing cookie cutter world building. The lore glossary is where it belongs - in the DMG.
