That I completely agree with. They're just background cogs that you're probably never going to. The others you can adventure in and have a lot of fun.
For a corebook, I would agree. I do think the pos and neg can be made interesting (I've seen it done), but that's better for a MotP-style supplement.
You beat me to it. An appendix with a number of alternate planes that did not fit the Great Wheel such as a plane of Dreams, one of Faerie, one of Mirrors, the Far Realms, and so on, and an alternate Myriad Planes cosmology, a Doppel cosmology, an orrery cosmology, and a Winding Roads cosmology.
Yeah, I have it in front of me. 20 pages of alternate cosmologies. Really cool stuff, and awesome art to boot!
THe downside is they didn't describe any of those alternate cosmologies for the pantheons in anywhere near the detail they deserved. They should have been primary adventure locales for games using those pantheons, with a well-written paragraph or so giving enough hooks for the DM.
3.0 Deities and Demigods was disappointing for a number of reasons, the stat blocks and the rules for divine stats were the only really fleshed out part of them. You could know whether a god got a +1 ranger favored enemy bonus when throwing a rock at a kobold, but usually only a paragraph of narrative description of the god. The pantheons had fewer entries than in prior editions (Gruumsh and Kurtulmak, but no Maglubiyet), and fewer pantheons (No American Indian, Celtic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mesopotamian, Nehwon, etc.). The art ranged from the amazing to the amazingly bad.
Nah, just send them over here; as at some point or other I've used all three.
