Not to hijack this thread with a meaningless response, but - I can agree with the sentiment of "fan netbook" - 90% of the stuff I've seen on the internet qualifies as crap, to one extent or another - the same also applies to a lot of the d20 publishers. People try their best, of course, but most efforts invariably turn out to be amateurish. The main label of a quality d20 product remains WotC, and even they have produced some stuff that has been sort of sordid, like Sword & Fist (many good things, but also lots of crap). In the end, the only good way to actually judge something is by seeing the final result - on its own merits. Having something in a physical format does not guarantee quality - it does guarantee that you waste money if it turns out to be crap, though.
I would say "no insult intended," which is true - I just tend to hold pretty high standards as to what is a good product and not. There aren't really that many very good products out there.
To return to the topic, Birthright, the boxed set, as initially published was pure quality - IMO the best campaign setting published by TSR in many ways. Botching that is sort of hard; botching the rules is another, all-too-common matter, but I think we generally have those well in hand.
What Birthright initially suffered under, as I see it, was a certain degree of poor marketing - the "king" aspect was emphasized far too much, to the detriment of what the world actually is - which is a marvelous fantasy world, extremely well built for adventuring and epic "change the world campaigns" though not necessarily epic levels. I think this may have turned a lot of people off - I only initially bought the box to take a look at the domain system, but when I actually read the world's background info - "wow, why didn't I buy this before?" The next thing that Birthright suffered from was a line-up of poor support products, when compared to the initial box - many of the support products were good or even excellent, but many also fall very, very low on my quality-meter.
Birthright was, in many ways, the most LotR-esque of TSR's settings - which should be a strong selling point nowadays. However, while I can't access sales figures, all things I've seen indicate that it fell far short of its potential, perhaps much due to poor marketing. In terms of sheer quality and potential for playability and "epicness," it is one of the best products to have come out of TSR during 2nd Edition.
Of course, that does guarantee the quality of what birthright.net is making - however, I would very much like that you judge it on its own merits, rather than lump it with "fan netbooks."
