There's something about social media that makes everyone oversensitive. I think it's entirely to do with communicating in writing (and that most people aren't very good at it). Professional writers sometimes struggle to get a character's feelings across. I can't see why we'd expect anyone to correctly express their thoughts and feelings in text. On top of THAT, we then expect everyone to correctly READ those thoughts and feelings without making any mistakes in their inference.
If I said, "I hate the Druid with the passion of a thousand exploding suns", when face-to-face, you'd probably get that I was kidding about the suns, but might be serious that I don't like the Druid, but here we'd probably get into an argument about exactly how many suns are allowed to explode to rank what level of passion.
You and I differ on this only in a matter of mild degree. I wish everyone was more charitable to each other, too. But I think that the only way to achieve the kind of charity that I'd like to see out of posters is to be extra charitable myself to the ones who are failing to be charitable to others. Does that make any sense?
At any rate, when it comes to hyperbole, I feel like the first step is generally to acknowledge it for what it is: An exaggeration not meant to be taken literally. The "not meant" part is key. If you give people the benefit that they didn't mean what they said to be taken literally, you wind up in a lot less arguments. (Generally. Arguments are hard to avoid on here.)
I agree that it can be difficult to read intent. I think that you are being more generous than me. I see a lot of the hyperbole here as coming from a place of aggression, of being more interested in scoring points than having a meaningful discussion. Given that this is a forum that WotC actually acknowledges, I find it more useful to put those posters on ignore rather than get caught up in a futile argument. I don't have your patience.
This thread, for example, is now being dominated by posters who seem to have little interest OneD&D being successful within the parameters described by WotC and come across as more intent on just discrediting the game.
Getting back to the video at hand, I think a few things are clear, namely that WotC does perceive paladin as largely solved, so we aren't going to see any radical proposals there, but WotC perceive druid as a problem class, so we can expect continued exploration of that design space, with the caveat that wild shape in some form will remain integral to druids.
The template proposal in its current form went over like a lead balloon, but I am interested to see if WotC remain attached to the principle but decide to drastically change the execution, or retreat and go back to using existing creature stat blocks but within some sort of new system.
What I would like to see is:
1. A more constrained/defined version of the current wild shape mechanics. I started out okay with templates, but the more we have discussed them, the more they have come to resemble a Frankenstein's monster idea to me, both in the sense of being a bunch of different parts sewn together, and in the sense of getting out of hand and turning druid shapeshifting into something else entirely.
2. Better balance for moon druids, which can come from 1.
3. Making elemental forms their own thing, definitely not a baseline druid feature, and here is where I would love to see a new, elemental sub-class added to the updated PHB because I think that there is a lot of fun potential.
