I don't think any of those examples are perfect. I think they are proof that doing something well is a long, long, long way from being able to vaguely gesture at doing it to literally any degree whatsoever.
So, alright. How about: A ten-year-old can write stories. Does that mean every...
I mean, those ads are wrong....but GMing is still hard.
That a bunch of 10-year-olds have attempted a thing is not the same as saying that doing it is easy. 10-year-olds paint. 10-year-olds play violin. 10-year-olds write stories. Does that mean that it is easy to paint like Dali...
And then...
"No. This is too much exactly the same as the old thing. Get rid of it and give us a new thing."
"No. This is too new. It's not exactly the same as the old thing. Get rid of it. Give us something exactly the same!"
It needs to be exactly the same but with none of the faults and...
Which is why I still advocate merging halfling and gnome into a single species which represents a type of land-bonded fey--gnome, halfling, Bergmännlein, "Kobel" (similar to but not the same as koblin/goblin/kobold), etc.--with the different subspecies linked to different terrain types...
4e gave them a pretty solid benefit, in that your second wind was a minor action rather than a standard. That opened up some significant options for both defensive and offensive combinations.
Well, er, they really aren't? That's part of why I mentioned what I mentioned.
Per DDB, they were in 4th place behind elf/half-elf and ahead of tiefling, for the final two sets of data put out. They're in 4th place on this chart--just above tiefling, well behind elf/half-elf.
The last time we...
You may come up with alternative explanations if you wish, but the data we got out of DDB, before they stopped sharing it, backs this assertion up.
Human was by far the most common. After that, Elf (all collected together) and Half-Elf duelled for second place. And then Tiefling had been 4th...
Hell, we know Gygax was perfectly comfortable having a freaking depowered balrog and a juvenile dragon as PCs, so long as the player was comfortable with having their power grow over time, starting from near-zero like everyone else.
People have been playing non-human options for ages.
Exactly.
Sometimes, growing up in a loving home full of resources makes one yearn for the thrill of adventure over a quiet life.
Sometimes, growing up in a terrible place where you're barely scraping by makes you afraid to leave, lest you lose what little you have.
It occurs to me, you could potentially get proper dragonborn (rather than draconians) by having a group of rebel draconians get their hands on the Greygem and wish for "a life of our own, free from the way we were born" or the like. They are dragonkin reborn--hence, dragon-born, not dragon-hatched.
More or less the same thing here.
Your answer indicated that getting a list was supposed to be evidence of those three things--coherency, distinctiveness, shapefulness--when they are not evidence of that in the first place. At best, they're orthogonal. Hence, if you are now saying that that...