Imagine that you are WOTC.
You're the biggest fish in a small pond. You have a tremendously loyal fan base. Your main product has, through sheer luck, had a bit of a moment for several years and that is continuing.
You've had a couple of PR blunders in the past year but have managed to put that behind you for a relatively low price.
Do you walk into a PR minefield?
Emotionally, I want to disagree.
The problem is, intellectually, I don't.
Dark Sun was amazing setting. Dark Sun is, frankly, a very relevant and contemporary setting in a lot of ways, perhaps moreso than when it was launched. Unfortunately, Dark Sun also has some seriously problematic elements, particularly the chattel slavery, and the breeding of sentients (which produces a mule-like being, unfortunately tying in to a bunch of early unscientific super-racist ideas about bi-racial people), which are possible to handle, but would be incredibly difficult to handle well.
I don't think D&D is going to have to avoid slavery ever appearing in settings. I do think that, for the present time, settings where slavery is a like, a big focus on the game (and negative thing to be sure, the players often start as slaves) is probably not the way to go.
I think an updated Dark Sun could actually still work, but it would be pretty significantly different. I'd certainly play down the chattel slavery, maybe have it so it's not really a thing, rather indentured servitude (which is similar but different enough and historically all races have experienced - see Bacon's Rebellion for a fascinating vision into how RL racism actually evolved partly as a defense against indentured servants realizing they were basically slaves), and probably even play down that a bit. Get rid of Muls, or more likely, put in something like them, but with a different origin, and certainly rename them. Probably play down psionics a bit (I love psionics to death, but 5E isn't positioned to handle them well at this point), and play up the "distant post-apocalypse" angle, include the "mutations" which were conceptually a part of DS originally but never really followed through on. Also play up the oppressive Templars and so on. The general contours of the setting would be the same, but the specifics would be quite different.
All that said though, I doubt it's worth the effort unless they have an exceptional vision for DS in 5E.
Planescape seems highly likely, esp. given DiTerlizzi doing stuff to do with it recently-ish. Plus it's not any kind of minefield, really.
Spelljammer would need a massive reboot, or folding into Planescape.
Dark Sun's simple enough to do as "There are evil slavers, its your job to kill them" which has pretty much been the thing since... Day one. If some third party comes along and goes and works out the economics for it, well, firstly they would have done it already because its not like there aren't evil slave-taking nations in what we presently have, but also.... Its not going to have a splashback effect if its clearly a third party.
Frankly Dragonlance is more of a PR minefield than Dark Sun is
I wish I agreed but I think this is naive. "Kill the bad slavers" is not enough. There's a difference in the level of focus on slavery - and DS previously focused on it but didn't really
address it - now you'd have to actually address it. I think there are ways around it, but you're being too flip about it in comparing it to other settings.
Dragonlance is a PR minefield for sure, too, and I doubt WotC will do it as an official setting in 5E. I'm honestly surprised they're even publishing novels for it.
