I think all the the variants should have been consolidated. So just one Elf, one Tiefling, etc. It would have reduce the size of the field to a manageable level.
That's what the original plan was going to be...but that approach isn't without its own problems. This approach would make it far too easy to eliminate the iconic options and unfairly favor newer/niche ones, since they are outnumbered ten-to-one. We would quickly find ourselves left with only the modern, largely-unheard of options...which wouldn't be a problem except that interest in the thread as a whole would fade. Without enough participation, this thread could languish for months.
Then I thought, "Well, what if we condensed them all into a single entry, and then weighted them? Give more points to the ones that have more variants...say, 5 points per variant?" But can you imagine the outcry if the Warforged started with 5 points while the Elf started with 45? Everyone would rage-quit the thread, and I wouldn't blame them. It just wouldn't be fun anymore with something so blatantly biased.
"How about I do Elves for Round 1, Tieflings for Round 2, etc., and then lump all of the single-variants into one last Round?" I thought to myself. "It's worked before!" But then I counted them all up, and realized we would have a dozen different rounds, all of different sizes, and even my hyperfocused, pedantic brain would be bored with it all by Round 3. Same if I sorted them into categories by book, or by date.
I did the best I could with the options given, trying to make the list both fair
and engaging,
with engagement being the most important thing in my opinion. And so the imperfect solution I chose, from a whole list of imperfect options, was to post all of the species variants separately in one huge list. It's not my fault that Wizards of the Coast created 9 different flavors of Elf but only 1 Warforged...so if anyone is playing favorites, they are. I can't fix that on this end.
This. There was absolutely no need for subraces in 5E. You could already have done a lot of what previous editions did with "subraces" by using race-specific feats. I hate subraces with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
I like what MMotM did with Aasimar: condensed all three of the variants down into a customizable feature.
FWIW, I agree with your sentiment about "subraces." Like I said earlier, all I will ever need in D&D is the optional rules in
Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. But it was immediately eliminated, so I'm gonna assume I'm in a very small minority.
