why is it a death spiral, can you make a case for it? The way I see it, it it had to be one, 5e would have had to spiral to its death years ago already
Death spirals can take a very long time, so I dunno why it would have happened already, but my point is that 5.5E does not seem (and we can only go with "seems", sadly, we just don't have figures, but this is a discussion of opinion, not hard facts, so I think that's okay, right?) to be attracting new players nor particularly bringing back a lot of lapsed players (not zero but not significant numbers), and in fact D&D seems to be slowly losing players at this point and to have been doing so for a while.
If you increasing your focus on just pushing subscriptions to a diminishing group, we've seen what happens for decades, maybe even close to a century at this point, because this goes back long before computers or the internet. You get into a situation where you keep slowly or rapidly losing users, and aren't getting new ones, but you have a constant, and, for a long time, substantial income stream which seems worth keeping, and in a lot of cases there's just an attitude of "benign neglect" where, sure, they're making less and less money, but they're still extremely profitable. This will be particularly true as more and more people move away from physical media to digital, which has a hugely higher profit margin on it. I mean, you can probably make more money on selling 5k books at N price digitally through your own store than you can on selling 15k books at N*1.8 via Amazon. Both are profit streams and the ideal case is people buy both (or better yet, as WotC is doing, the physical book is also bought through their store, so more of the profit from that goes to them, though they have to offer deals/incentives to do this, which cuts into that potentially).
So this whole idea that they should just keep going with 5.5E indefinitely as the market slow or rapidly shrinks doesn't seem likely to work out.
And WotC aren't, say, Chaosium. I think people forget that. Chaosium or the like might be happy with an "evergreen" product which they just refresh occasionally, as CoC is.
WotC however are a significant corporate entity who are part of Hasbro (who are undeniably greedy and have a long history of precipitous actions lacking foresight, like, say, sell off allllllll their brands digitals rights, as they did in the early 2000s, for a pittance), and who have threatened to stop making D&D before (though it is to be admitted they did not make good on their threat, it was taken seriously by designers). Shareholders in Hasbro have floated the idea of selling off WotC, or even selling off D&D specifically (IIRC).
So I think if they did just stick with this 5.5E forever plan that some people have suggested is D&D's playerbase would shrink and shrink, and 5.5E would accumulate more and more and more semi-optional cruft and insane amounts of stuff it kind of had to be "back compatible" with as 5.5.5E and so on came out, but because it would likely remain profitable for a long time (esp. with a Beyond-focused approach), it would get into situation where some new WotC or Hasbro exec suddenly decided to vault the IP or sell it off or w/e. Whereas I don't think that's likely to happen if a more typical course for D&D is taken, and we continue to get actual new editions.
Seems to me that many of the people wishing for 6e don't play 5e and quite likely wouldn't play 6e, or if they did play 6e would soon get tired of it as well and move on to something else.
People said the same about every edition. Even 3E. Hell, even 2E! "< sticks thumbs in belt, adopts Old West accent > H'well I reckon there ain't many fellas out there who actually h'want to play [next edition] and thems fellas that say they does will be mighty bored mighty soon!". It's an old, old refrain. It's always been wrong so far, and always spoken with utter confidence despite that.
If they're going to take a risk, I'd expect it to be into other genres like sci-fi with Exodus or maybe a new take on a modern day D&D.
Again, every time that's been tried by WotC, it's been a car crash. Similar attempts haven't been very successful for other companies either.
They already have an Exodus RPG which basically no-one bought, and the fact that you're writing like they haven't tried that really highlights how that was a bad idea.
So as much as I'd love to see new high production values SF RPGs, I don't think this is a suggestion that makes much sense. Modern day D&D is always a bad idea, especially because the people who design it are always weirdly old fogies who hate anime and refuse to even consider emulating its tropes, but the main core audience for that would 100% be people who love anime and videogames (and certain kinds of Isekai particularly).
