You still don't understand the issue. It's not about Strahd finding people worthy. The point is he's not in control of his curse. Strahd is as much a prisoner of the Mists as any of his subjects. He can't find an heir any more than Satan can free himself from the pit. The only way he can be free...
I think you're confusing Ravenloft with other settings. Ravenloft was never tied to "sales of books" since the Ravenloft fiction line was virtually a non-entity, and half of the time didn't seem to even get referenced by the RPG writers. And almost every Ravenloft adventure affected the setting...
Plenty of the darklords were 0-level humans. They were hardly overpowered. But leaving that aside, "affecting the status quo" was never solely about whether you could kill a darklord or not.
A terrible addition to that adventure that severely misunderstands Strahd's curse - it's tied to him! He...
Again, that was not something that existed prior to 5E. Barovia used to feel like an isolated and cut-off backwater, now it doesn't. It's up to you which is your preference, but it is very cclear that the feel of Barovia and Ravenloft as a whole changed significantly.
Where have you been? ALL of the domains were substantially reconfigured, some to the point where they only share a name with the previous iteration. And this started with the depiction of Barovia in Curse of Strahd.
Oh, you are mistaking WotC for an organisation that likes setting flavour, or fidelity to past settings. They don't care about that anymore. Now it's just the several different types of bland, flavourless goop.
How is this different to 5E? Every player just plays tieflings as red-skinned horned Mod Edit humans. And so forth.
Sometimes I feel I get roleplaying from an all human party, to be honest.
A lot of the canon Western Oerik is also based on his campaign, the Greyhawk community has crosschecked the Dragon Annual map against Froideval's comic and found the names and geography match up for the most part.
War of Souls was always a bit schizophrenic on acknowledging non W/H contributions to the canon. It acknowledged most of the Fifth Age stuff for instance, but made some howling errors while doing so (According to DoaFS Palin Majere never led the White Robes? According to prior material. not only...