I like FR and respect ED for his work at creating a great setting in the Forgotten Realms. I can defininitely appreciate Ed's comments and wish they allowed him greater creative control of FR trough the years.
I hated the fact that they shoe-horned Al-Qadim, Maztica and Oriental Adventures into FR making it a nearly complete earth analogue setting. It's no that these settings aren't excellent but I think that making so many rival pantheons in FR messed it up. I think that the gods of FR should be the gods of FR with different names throughout the entire world. I Read somewhere that Ed didn't even want the racial deities in FR but TSR stuck them in their anyway.
TSR and WoTC turned FR into a "kitchen sink" world that tried to include everything in a messy, sloppy manner that diluted FR into something I think Ed never desired it to be.
In regard to this reboot, I am entirely for it. FR is too light and fluffy. I run a good, noble-hero type campaign nearly always, but I much prefer darker settings than settings involving rollicking adventure. High Fantasy is not about rollicking mercenary adventurers in a world of stupid villians while Gritty Fantasy can be about mercenary adventurers, but it isn't a fun-filled outing where one can expect victory and battles scaled to one's abilities. IMO the reboot might make FR more of both High Fantasy and Gritty Fantasy in their truest sense as opposed to merely D&D fantasy which is IMO something other entirely.
Hopefully from the reboot on, they will decide to write the gods as other than dumb, colorless, one dimensional caricatures and make them more like the gods they were modeled after. Don't go halfway. Make them beyond alignment, complex and interesting like the gods of myth who do what they do for reasons beyond the understanding of mortals.
Sundragon