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The "forcing" part of railroading is typically that any any action the players take that attempt to deviate from the pre-determined plot will either fail or end up back on the rails through DM fiat. Your definition of "railroading" is very different from the conventional one. You should stop...

An ostrich will always run faster than a human, regardless of how many skill points the human has put into Athletics. Is that racist?

After reading this article, I'm even more tempted to move to an all-human campaign world for any 5.5 games I run.

Railroading isn't planning out a story path in advance, it's forcing the players to stay on that path regardless of what actions the characters attempt.

Then D&D 5e is not the game for you.

Perhaps the reason the ranger is just a half-caster is that they spend so much effort on learning to cast quietly. If wotc didn't hate rangers they could introduce a feature like: "The ranger can call upon the power of nature with barely a whisper. The verbal component of your spells can't be...

Spells are the major exception, casters get to pick new spells at regular intervals, and when a new books add more spells it can have a significant impact.

I guess wotc's plan is to stop pissing gamers off, if they've let the one guy they had who was skilled at apologizing leave the company.

I don't like the standard covers very much, so I'll be picking up the new books as soon as they are available if I can get the alternate covers. I don't have any immediate plans to play 5.5, but I know I'll regret it if I don't get the good looking books while I can.

Or the players need to put some thought into what challenges they take on, once they understand that they are allowed to lose. Anyway, the A-Team gets captured and locked up in a shed pretty much every episode, so the story can work even with regular setbacks like that ;)

D&D really needs mechanics to let the PCs be defeated in combat but not all die. Retreating or being taken prisoner allows the story to continue even if the bad guys won this fight, but the system makes a TPK the most likely result if the PCs lose in combat.

They've finally listened to the players who want a spell-less bard.

The lore doesn't have to match the character generation mechanics. You can have a setting where the typical dwarf is a master of stone and the typical elf a woodland expert, all reflected in NPC stats and abilities. But player characters are all exceptional individuals with the blank-slate...

I wouldn't play in a D&D-like game where races don't have any mechanical impact, the races just aren't very interesting on their own.

Turns out you don't actually need to think in order to outdo or replace humans in a lot of tasks.

So that Silence can work.

That depends on the DM. Many reasonably assume that you only need one person to make noise to give away the whole group, so go with individual tests and compare the lowest result with the opposition's passive perception.

How do you "project your voice" without increasing the volume?

Trying to sneak as a group without Pass without Trace is pretty much guaranteed failure. Someone is going to get unlucky, roll a 2 and get spotted even if they have a decent stealth bonus.