Yep, they ignore you, that is true. Presumably because there aren't enough of you willing to purchase enough material for WotC to warrant spending the time and money and manpower to produce it. Which of course is why they allow 3rd party producers to provide you material you all might want instead, but if you don't want 3PP... there's nothing they can do about that.
If you have come to terms with this reality and accept that you aren't going to be served going forward, then that is commendable. Unfortunately, some people have a harder time accepting they aren't the market being served anymore (See: the
D&D Editions: Anybody Else Feel Like They Don't Fit In? thread.)
The real question, of course, is whether or not WotC is right in their analysis of where the market is. For comparison, look at Hollywood. Although the population of America is higher than it's ever been, and inflation has increased ticket prices over time, the box office is significantly down in recent years. Hollywood has clearly mistaken what their audience is and what they want, and are providing a product who's sales are significantly down year over year, with rapid degradation in the most recent years. The supply shock of the lockdowns no longer explains this, so the parsimonious solution is that the audience is smaller for what they're producing, because they're overestimating support for their product, and underestimating support for the products that were more like what they used to make. Either that or the entire theatrical experience is an outdated business model. Except that ratings for new streaming stuff are—mostly—underperforming too, and there are still exceptions like the Mario movie or the Top Gun movie that do very well in theaters.
If WotC is correct, then yeah, you're 100% correct. People left behind need to just accept the fact that they aren't part of the largest segment of the market anymore and therefore they won't be served by new WotC products very often. If they also don't accept 3PP products, then they're limiting themselves to not having any new product anymore. Crying about it online a lot will just annoy everyone around you at some point.
If WotC is incorrect, though, then either the market is fragmented, and the pluralities of tastes are significant enough that they need some kind of service, the largest plurality or even majority isn't as big as it used to be and therefore won't bring in as much revenue as it used to, or that they're not even chasing the right plurality or the majority, and people are only reluctantly accepting what they're producing when what they really want is more like what they used to produce. If this is true, then it
does make sense to advocate for your tastes, because you believe that you are part of a significant underserved part of the market rather than simply a small niche underserved part of the market.
Either way, though, saying that you refuse to look at 3PPs seems like shooting yourself in the foot (using the generic you; this is more in response to the quote you're responding to than to yours.) I think the old paradigm that D&D
is the market is likely to be over in the near future if it isn't already. More and more alternative brands of "D&D" are successfully finding a market, and even a pretty big market if a number of the kickstarters that are funding at very high levels is any guide. It's especially weird to say this while also saying that you don't understand the point of retroclones. Retroclones were designed specifically because the old stuff
wasn't available, and people who didn't have them handy in good shape had a hard time getting their hands on them. Arguably
now that's no longer true, but in the meantime, the retroclones got pretty well established, and most of them are better organized, better written, or fix a few issues that nobody much ever really liked back in the day. Most people who are playing old-style D&D (apparently) prefer playing retroclones rather than the old games.
In fact, the entire post you're responding to is just kind of weird. "Everyone should play exactly what I want to play, and if they want to play something else or use something else, I don't understand them and WotC should ignore them and just make what I want," is pretty much how it reads to me. Weird. Weird. To quote Rachel Zegler ironically.
If WotC devoted a division to supporting prior editions and making new material for those editions, I think they would find the hobby grow even more. But, as you say, perhaps they've looked into it and just found the cost wouldn't be effective and allow the 3PP to fight over the scraps of prior editions...
