Oh, I totally agree. 5e is the D&D that people want. Full stop.
No matter what, if WotC doesn't 100% toe the line here, they get nothing but endless flack. Try a new format - a la Spelljammer? It's a total money grab and terrible product. Try a module where you don't have to kill everything? Total waste of time, piece of crap, stupid. Try a module where you have 4 different potential adventures in the same product? Nope, total garbage.
Write a pretty straight line railroad adventure path set in a totally familiar location, using nothing original or new? Best selling adventure of the edition.
And people wonder why 5e is bland and generic?
Well yeah, I made this thread
"Things people want", where I tried my best to compile things that people on these forums passionately want to be part of 5e. And often these desires are completely incompatible with the things others want.
It illustrates the real problem 5e faces. WotC did it, they got the majority of players on board. Now, unfortunately, they have two problems.
The first? Everyone wants different things from the game.
The second? They can only afford to cater to what the majority want. The days of throwing random books out into the ether so everyone can find one they can latch onto, be it Unearthed Arcana full of optional rules, or the Tome of Magic or Magic of Incarnum, or even the Complete Psionics Handbook, for people who want something other than standard magic everywhere...those days are gone.
Hasbro has said WotC needs to be a profit generating machine. That means experimental products are out the window. We need to make those ourselves now, or hope some 3rd party does it (I want to plug Steampunkette here for doing the hard work of giving 5e a real psionics system).
We can't expect to get "the thing we want" unless a lot of other people want the same thing. If the fanbase is split apart into a bunch of different factions, with one clamoring "change this!" and the other demanding "change nothing!", what do you suppose will happen?
The time and energy of game developers costs money. You put a few guys on "ok, make a 5e Incarnum system", they aren't working on anything else. You're paying them for their time. The resulting book had better sell! And if it doesn't, well, that will doom any other such project for years to come.
That's why WotC makes all these Unearthed Arcanas, to show us stuff they are interested in developing. Now you'd think, if that's not what you want, well, you'd keep quiet about it.
But there are some people on this very forum who will cry havoc at the idea of WotC working on an idea they don't care for, instead of working on what
they want.
Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. So yeah, of course WotC is going to be conservative.
I don't like it. I'm not defending it. But that's how it is. The TTRPG market is rough. Like anthropologists, you publish or die. But unlike them, if the thing you publish doesn't sell X amount of units, it makes the company lose money for going to bat.
WotC needs assurances that they will get your almighty dollar; without that, you can't get the things you want.