Against my better judgement I bought three of the Essentials books. I think I spent about 20 minutes looking at each and for the most part I couldn't find anything that was useful or interesting. Mostly lots of duplicate information from the 4E books. The new classes were lackluster. Maybe they...
That's short term thinking. How many characters are you going to create over the next five years? Twenty just doesn't cut it. I often make a few characters for every new game just to play around with concepts. Maybe it's OK for six months, but if the product is successful then it's going to need...
I still think character builders should be free. They make the game more accessible and with all the rules to track it's a bit of a nightmare to try to build characters. This was such a big time sink in 3/3.5 and now it's showing up in 4E with multiple PHBs, Powers, settings, Essentials, etc...
My friend Cale found this flavor inconsistency:
On the sidebar on page 225 PHB bottom left it lists Residuum as having a "silvery color". However under the "Disenchant Magic Item" Ritual listing on page 304 of the PHB it's listed as "...golden [colored] dust..." So which is it?! :-)