Your assumption is that you somehow need the PHB II and so on. But you just don't. The game works at is. Naming them PHB II is a marketing ploay, implying:
"We treat this as Core, so you can expect further support for it, even in other settings." (this is actually the only thing that really matters - it means it's not like the 3E new base classes that you often had only one book and would never see again - and this was criticized, so there is obviously a portion of the market that finds this better then the idea of purely contained supplements!)
"We worked on this with the same effort as for the first one."
"This is stuff you really want to have - it's core!"
But the truth is it's still just a supplement you can buy or ignore.
The failed premise is that a complete game is what you are told it is, rather than what you want out of it. If they remove Boardwalk and Park Place form monopoly and add in another Chance and Community Space, then it will not make everyone happy that they tried to replace their old game to still be able to play with something inferior that was not what they wanted.
Likewise always changing what races and classes are core is silly. They could have added the new class, and 2 new races, and made elves bi-polar without taking other stuff out, and given people what they most wanted, and what was in the past book as core.
D&D needs a firm core, and not all this wishy-washy crap.
Make up your damn mind if monk's exist or not!
Then you make people wait a entire year for the class they were wanting all along, while other people are already playing and this player gets disgruntled playing something they didn't want or having to convert or kill off a character when most other players could "convert" to 4th edition with the "standard" classes in the first PHB.
I just don't believe the splat books are core philosophy.
If they are optional, then call them so, and stop trying to lie to consumers for whatever reason. I think they even said they left out classes to encourage people to buy the new books to get into the habit of a new PHB or DMG coming out each year.
That is just plain wrong on design, marketing, and ethics.
If you want consumers to buy new books, then make something of quality that they will want to buy, not by holding out things you:
a) didn't have time to finish because you rushed the product out
b) wanted to save for later to get someone to buy a new book
c) didn't want implications of rape in core material
But now...here is the funny part...Humans rape orcs and that is where half-orcs come from for the Realms. Not monsters raping humans, but those brutal humans invading orc villages and having their way with the orc women.
I guess all half-elf parent unions were just the most happy thing ever right Tanis?
They need to find a core, like other games did decades ago, and build onto that. Then D&D would be a much more stable game. Transition between editions would be much smoother for players. Maybe even make some more money for the company at the same time with a more confident player base about the product.
Now its like looking for the blue lines after peeing on the stick to see if its good news or bad coming your way....
Be consistent. It is ok to have the same sort of material in the core, and have only one set of core, that make people comfortable about changing with things they know and are comfortable with, without resorting to tactics to get people to buy extra books to get what they had in the past like 2nd, 3rd, 4th all have done.
You want the splat books to sell? Make it of the quality that people cannot resist!
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