A hugely frustrating article, I'm afraid. James Wyatt writes about something he's very clearly an expert in... and says nothing of consequence. Basically, they're keen to make sure you can continue doing whatever you have been doing... oh, and they're retconning bits of the FR pantheon but doing it in such a way that if you did make the change then that's good too.
Yeah, that was my take-away too.
That said, my expectations for this area are so low as to be abysmal. D&D has simply never made (what I consider to be) a very good presentation of sentient, interventionist deities in a fantasy world. To be fair, I do think that they've tried, and there's certainly been some credible attempts to do so (e.g. 2E FR's
Faiths & Avatars series of books).
The major problem, in my view, is that they keep treating religions as a bottom-up presentation (e.g. present the mortal church at its most accessible level, with the description tapering off as you go up the hierarchy, culminating in only an abridged explanation for how things are arranged once you transcend the mortal religion and move into the realm of the deity and their planar servants).
I call this a problem because having thinking, active deities means that they'll be continuously engaged - with their churches, with other gods, with political machinations, etc. - and in doing so set the directions that trickle down throughout their planar servants and mortal church(es). Religions in this context are much more easily defined from the top down, rather than the reverse.
This, however, is a problem because acknowledging what deities are
trying to accomplish implicitly opens the dialogue regarding what their capabilities are, which is the first step towards giving the gods some sort of statistics (as statistics are the hallmark of quantification, which is how you judge limitations - and gods must have limitations, otherwise they wouldn't be
trying to do anything - they'd just do it).
Unfortunately, even the vaguest specter of "stats for gods" seems to send quite a lot of gamers into a complete breakdown, for a variety of reasons. Hence, we'll probably never see this approach, even though it seems (to me) to be the one that'd work best.
Of course, I am somewhat biased in this regard; I just finished reading
The Primal Order (now available in
POD and PDF), which I think is the greatest book on gods in RPGs ever written, and this is the view it advocates (which I wholeheartedly agree with).
