While I understand the reasons for the push on the D&D brand, I've found it's consequences to be on the "bad" side from me, personally.
Here's where I'm coming from:
For me, D&D was always the role-playing system. And since I came in during 2e (early 90's), with the emphasis on settings, I always saw D&D as a sort of general, pretty vague and overall transparent "wrapper". D&D wasn't something to me, PlaneScape was, FR was, Dragonlance was, etc. D&D was just the "name of the company producing my games" in a sense.
When 3e came around, I found the system to be so cool! : incredible options, monsters with reasonable hps (I actually called up a friend just to tell him gold dragons had over 300 hp... wow, that does not paint me in any kind of positive light...) The rules were pretty much all over the place and there was a thriving market/community of people doing all kinds of things to change it, fix it, etc, etc (the Arcana Unearthed/Evolved version of 3e is by far my favorite, btb) But, still, D&D wasn't really its own thing - kind of like "play outside". You go and play outside, but it's not a specific enough activity by itself. You play soccer, hockey, kick the rock, hide and seek, bum rush, international, run around, etc.
When 4e came around, I was ecstatic : the rules were presented in a clear manner, there was no "voluntary obfuscation" - I found that SO AWESOME. In a sense, for me, D&D had become "the perfect D&D" :
- the rules finally encouraged the kind of play the texts, novels and sidebars had suggested you do (and all the previous fixes/versions/hacking had attempted to do)
- my DM prep time was reduced to... well, actually, my DM prep time didn't really change all that much - at the time, I had such high system mastery (and was sane enough to drop the whole "proper build" thing) that everything I created could usually be fit on 2 or 3 lines written in crayon on a small napkin : +hit, AC/Flatfooted AC, hp, important spells known, saves. Everything else I made up on the fly. BUT it was very cool to see that I could run this new edition with about 30 seconds notice (while my system mastery was barely level 1).
- DM tools (mostly creatures, traps, skill check and the like) were sane and coherent : no more "bonus feat" galore required for a cat to climb a stupid tree... If the cat should be able to climb the tree, it just bloody could climb the tree - and the mechanics didn't have to be "lied to".
- and other very excellent things - those who know, know, those who don't : there are better places to learn about this.
... but the main thing was that D&D still wasn't its own thing yet to my mind - sure there were similarities (mostly of the "annoying to me" kind) between the editions, but each was just a different set of rules to play the same kind of games.
When 5e came around, I was... not thrilled : there was so much system that was still un-explored with 4e. I compared that to 3e which had been turned on its head so many times, it could literally (ok, not really, literally, but it's an abuse of language I'm willing to make here for effect) look at the back of it's own head! 2e was always a mish-mash of a bunch of subsystems, so I never thought about system exploration - if you wanted something "new" you just made up your own subsystem and, when problems arose, you just used a 15 pound hammer to round the edges "a bit".
To be honest, I still don't like 5e. I don't very much like the rules - the core resolution principles are generally to my tastes (depending upon which principles you include in the core) but much of the classes, spell system and monsters... not so much. So far, my play experiences as a player have been, on the rules' side, very poor and I feel I've lost to much in terms of my DM tools to appreciate being a DM - but I have yet to give a real go of it...
But the thing that makes me dislike 5e (and is quite possibly tainting my perceptions of the rules) is the way that D&D has become its own thing. In essence, there's too much D&D in 5e for my tastes - a bit higher I complained a bit about the similarities between editions that annoyed me, yeah, well they're still here. But it's not that they're still here, it's that they are presented in a manner that seems to elevate them to "what D&D is really about".
So yeah, this is why the recent D&D brand push has been a poor thing in my experience : it's brought to the fore all the little D&Disms that I dislike and waved them in my face up and down.
By trying to define itself as something more concrete, it's sort of lost what I liked about it, and sort of up-played what I dislike about it.
All this being said, I do wish for the hobby to thrive and if it takes 5e to make it so, then count me on the supporting team - I'll just be on the water squad rather than the offensive line startup.
