Yes, I decided to invoke Betteridge's Law ... because, to date, I am decidedly underwhelmed by the 50th Anniversary of D&D.
I share your feelings, unsurprisingly to those few who haven't put me in their ignore list yet and therefore can still read my rants about the whole half-editions thing.
A 50 years anniversary should be a big deal. There could be online celebrations, public events, re-prints of famous books (although
5e updates of them are actually a good thing IMO), special boxes with useful props, and maybe even small freebies on WotC websites. Instead, the whole anniversary is basically taken as an excuse for a facelift of character material to sell everyone another copy of the core books. Character material updates which, under the theoretical lens, might look like factual improvements, but won't really make a difference in the end. A whole new edition with different rules for everything would have at least created an additional option along all the previous editions, but 5e is just so good at its core that it would be too risky to throw it away.
It's not like 5e cannot be improved. It's just that both the sales managers at WotC and the fanbase is aligned in once again fixating on fiddling with the little bits of character builds, and not targeting the area where the game publications are eternally lacking: teaching players and DMs to make the game their own and make it shine, in whatever style they choose.
The only good thing on the 50th anniversary horizon, is that I'm getting unexpected requests from family, coworkers and friends to run more games for them. Apparently they've been missing past gaming times together, and reading that this year is the 50th is stirring up good memories. Of course most of them care nothing for the ruleset being used, and of course therefore we'll play either BECMI, 3.0 or pre-Tasha 5e.
