Oh, come now, that's taking it rather far. In most ways the system works quite nicely. Considering 5E was developed by a skeleton crew, back in the days of 4E's decline when it looked like Hasbro might just put D&D on a shelf and forget about it, and they were trying to simultaneously woo back Pathfinder and old-school gamers while hanging onto the remaining 4E player base... I think they did pretty darn well.
Even getting people to admit that 5e has a skeleton crew is like pulling teeth, so no, I don't really feel like I'm going overboard here. They took three years to design a game. Surely something as fundamental as "how many Things To Do each time-period" being
significantly off,* yet also being a core idea around which a historical class design problem (martial or mostly-martial characters vs. full-caster characters) was meant to be solved, is worth noting as a serious design fault that somehow
never came up. They spent
months faffing about with mechanics that ended up entirely or mostly in the bin (such as Specialties or the Expertise Die), took
years to make a Fighter that even Mearls himself wasn't entirely satisfied with, etc.
I'm not trying to say their work is garbage, but it's a pretty flawed work for the amount of time, expertise, and attention it got. I'm not a professional game designer by any means, so maybe there are externalities to the job that I'm not aware of, but it's just a little hard to see how this skeleton crew made a game with a much bigger budget than something like 13A did (which had a smaller crew, I'm almost certain) which has far fewer, and much more easily-addressed, points of concern. (Over-generic backgrounds, not really liking Icon stuff, and weak/overly-passive Paladins being the main faults I've seen brought up.)
*As in, the math
does work out, on average, with an average of just over 7
actual combats and 2-3 short rests per long rest; at that point the Champion's "crit-chance-only" damage bonus actually catches up. All data I've seen from actual play, and Crawford's own words WRT the "class feature variants" doc, indicate that the average is much closer to 3-4 actual combats per day and 1 or maybe 2 short rests, something that skews the balance of the game very strongly toward already-powerful classes like Paladin and Bard.
Big picture, though, it's not the end of the world.
Reverse catastrophization isn't a particularly strong argument. That it isn't the end of the world is not a reason to shy away from frank criticism. This is a fundamental element of the game, upon which the design of numerous player options depend, which leads to continuing unfortunate and frustrating trends (like "classes that primarily use spells consistently do more than classes with none" and "the options meant to be given to new players to help draw them into the game also tend to be the weakest ones.") Calling that out, and asking how it could have happened with almost
three full years of public playtesting and months more of internal playtesting, is not Chicken Little prophesying the collapse of the heavens, it is a genuine statement of surprise and frustration as to how this process produced this result.
As far as what we the fans should do, my solution has been to talk up my personal house rule (like I've been doing in this thread) when the topic comes up, and hope it spreads and eventually someone at Wizards thinks, "Hmm, that's a good idea." And if I see a survey about rest mechanics, I'll make my preferences known. I don't think there's a huge amount one individual player can do to shift WotC's strategy.
Sure. But "do a good thing and hope, eventually, someone in power pays attention" is not exactly an inspiring message of change either.
