AbdulAlhazred
Legend
There were a lot of "4e doesn't have enough fluff" complaints flying around prior to Essentials, so that makes sense.
Meh. Those complaints never really stand up to examination though. I'm sure you recall the famous thread over on the 4e GD forum a while back (since I see you post over there a bunch) where one of us actually challenged someone that made this claim to come up with an objective assessment. It turned out 4e actually has MORE fluff by almost any measure you could name than any of the previous editions, oddly enough.
I think, like many complaints about 4e, there's some underlying dissatisfaction that someone will have. Then they talk about it, and try to articulate it, and it is very hard to do that. I don't doubt that people making that complaint are expressing some way in which they felt that there was a lack of 'color' in some sense. The 4e presentation wasn't communicating to them a vision that engaged their imagination in some way. The problem is it seems like WotC's analysis of those observations was very superficial, given that the response was just to add even more redundant flavor text on top of what was already a hefty helping, objectively.
My reaction to what they've done so far with DDN is largely similar. There hasn't really been a deep analysis, or if there was it was done by the wrong people with the wrong skill set or something. I fear that the 'answers' they're coming up with are still the wrong answers, and they haven't, perhaps, even really asked the right questions.