Baldur's Gate 3 was made by Larian Studios. The other games you mentioned were mediocre at best. And there are far more WotC produced games for D&D that bombed than were successful.
There was some mechanical weight, defilers would become corrupted over time. Gaining a penalty to Charisma and encounter checks in addition to their body physically mutating.
There was a dragon magazine article that came out that mimicked the metamagic effects we saw arcane casters get in 3.5e. I can't remember the precise issue, but it had all kinds of effects you could apply to the spell when defiling, and your casting time decreased as well.
1) Then that's even more of a suggestion that we are not going to get an actual "Dark Sun" book, but rather, something more generic, like a Doomspace book for Spelljammer.
2) In Dark Sun it does. If you dared to defile in the presence of other sentient beings, they would usually lynch and kill...
So again we get "defilers" that don't destroy the plants and land around them when they defile during spellcasting. But this time it's implemented even worse than the 4e version, as it's locked into a single subclass, rather than being a metamagic variation (which is what it should be).
If...
I've been trying to put together a PDF of the entire Age of Worms AP plus the Wormfood articles from Dragon to make a hardcover via Lulu. But wrestling with the Lulu design wizards has been frustrating me to no end. If anyone has more experience with this I would appreciate it!
Also I would...