Folks keep saying incremental changes is equivalent to nothing and that's not correct.
It's not nothing. I explicitly said so above (bold added for emphasis):
Now, don't mistake me. I get that this is a prediction of future trends, and I am no fortuneteller. But if past is prologue, and if 5.5e is as minimally changed as I expect it to be, then it isn't alarmist in the least to say that five-ish years from now, there will be rather more criticism than there is today, and much of it will center on things that can't be fixed iteratively or gradually.
Which was my thesis.
I even explicitly said, repeatedly, that a balance between stability and change is needed. Too much change and you drive people away. Too much lack of change and people slowly get fed up. Iterative change tries to have its cake and eat it too, and in fairness it actually does a decent job at that. But there are some things it cannot fix, even in principle—and as those things remain fixed points for longer and longer stretches, they will chafe more. That is the nature of the beast.
In order for criticism to center on things that
can't be fixed iteratively or gradually, there must be things iterative/gradual change
can fix that, as a result, won't get criticism...because they were fixed! "Iterative change...actually does a decent job[....but] there are some things it cannot fix." There is no sense in which I, or as far as I can tell anyone else, has argued that iterative change does genuinely, absolutely nothing. It can do quite a lot, even! But there are things it just can't fix.
I had already presumed that iterative change would be fixing the things it can fix. Hence, attention will focus on those things that iterative change can't address. Such things will thus remain mostly static over time if only iterative change is permitted. Unchanged things suffer two problems. One, if someone has encountered them early (like, say, me), then the fact that they remain unchanged over a long period of time will chafe. Two, the longer they remain, the more chances anyone who
hasn't seen it will eventually see it. The rate may be slow or fast, but unless you're actually
losing customers, it ain't negative.
Yes, well my point was D&D has never had a competitor for the number 1 spot that wasn't created by D&D itself.
Sure. First-mover bias. You can see similar things, for example, with IBM. What we now call "PCs" are actually PC-
alikes, because IBM originally developed the (trademarked) Personal Computer. In creating a standard that was then widely adopted by competitors, IBM created their own competition--and eventually outcompeted within their market. Sometimes you see a very similar phenomenon in game development, where Company A creates a prominent game or franchise, but then fires/lays off significant chunks of the original development team, who go on to create competing products, some of which can even eclipse their original work.
And, because I have to say this every single time or else someone will get their knickers in a twist,
no that is not the only reason things are successful. But it is an extremely strong force in many cases, alongside many other factors not strictly related to quality or every single specific characteristic or detail about something, e.g. network effects are a pretty huge deal
especially for stuff like tabletop gaming where it literally doesn't work unless you have multiple people all using the same system.
(Which, incidentally, that was why they made such grandiose proposals for what "modularity" would do back in the Next Playtest. If it had, in fact, actually been the case that you could play a character that
felt and
played like a 1e character in the same game as Pat's character that
felt and
played like a 4e character, and Chris's character that
felt and
played like a 3e character, then the problem of "need everyone on the same system" becomes a hell of a lot less painful--if pretty much everyone can get a really good match for what they want out of the experience, then there's a very compelling reason to join up. Sadly, 5e completely gave up on any amount of "modularity" remotely like that, and defaulted to wishy-washy "advice" that usually amounts to, "Some people prefer X, while others only want not-X. You'll have to decide what you want to do!" Quite often without any actual recommendations for HOW to do that, beyond just
stating the concept.)