And that wasn't even the point.
Er, no, it was the entire point all along, because my involvement in this entire chain or replies (follow the up-arrows) started with a reply to:
Good to know. I'm not against the concept of a fairy dragon (if anyone else here has read the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull, you'll know about Raxtus the Fairy Dragon, who I think is awesome), I just absolutely despise the ones that exist in D&D. They shouldn't be prankster dragon-cats with invisibility and trickery magic. They should be Feywild equivalents of the Shadow Dragons that have nature and healing magic and are actually dragon-sized instead of Tiny.
I was always discussing your assertion of what faerie dragons in D&D
should be.
Well, what they "should be" is necessarily a question
not of what any individual would have preferred (
de gustibus non est disputandum, after all), but rather what WotC needed to have published in order to achieve WotC's goals.
Thus why my initial response was not "invisible prankster cat-dragons are cool!" or "tradition is sacred", but rather:
the designers eliminating a long-established creature just to steal its name for a completely different concept would be gratuitously insulting to the existing fanbase.
I was assuming, I grant, it would be obvious that "gratuitously insulting to the existing fanbase" was a reference to commercial viability. Insofar as that was not clear, I owe you an apology for not being explicit.
Now, as far as . . .
Which, though true, doesn't matter now with a Dragon book coming out. They can change the lore for faerie dragons midway through an edition. It's not unprecedented. Drow lore is changing, for example. They have the fanbase now, and are capable of abandoning sacred cows for the purpose of improving D&D without tradition-sticklers getting in the way now.
. . . I think that radically changing faerie dragons seven years into an edition is an even
worse idea for WotC than doing so at the change of an edition, when people expect things will change.
Yes, there are legions of new fans acquired over the last seven years. The thing is, these new fans of 5th edition are fans of 5th edition as it exists, not fans of a hypothetical revised version they've never seen. They're as likely to be attached to the faerie dragons they saw for the first time in the 5th edition
Monster Manual as any played-since-1983 fan is attached to the faerie dragons they saw for the first time in the 1st edition
Monster Manual II. Few of the new fans will care if a new book contradicts some "canon" that was done in 1974, 1984, 1994, or 2004, but many
many more will if it contradicts canon from 2014.
The drow case you invoke is not parallel, since the "classic" drow are being kept as-is alongside the new cultures (that the designers on social media keep pointing out the Menzoberranzan drow aren't changing is a clear indicator that they get this), and the change doesn't invalidate the current
Monster Manual statblock the way replacing existing faerie dragons with a completely different version would.
The correct move for WotC, then, is to parallel the shadow dragon with a new fey dragon template with its own distinct name, while leaving the extant faerie dragon alone.