In my late 4e days I ran Essentials-Only and found it a much more enjoyable way to play the game. My players missed having access to all the options, particularly the overpowered options like Twin Strike and other stuff but the game was much smoother and faster. I think if Essentials had been received better, it might have extended 4e longer than the short 4 years it had between 3.5 and 5th.
Some interesting insights on your blog. I think this was the hardest pill to swallow for players, especially those that have grown accustomed to having so many options available to them, and regularly fed more on a monthly basis. Thanks for sharing these!
Since I started this personal project a couple of years ago, I've made a few personal observations of my own.
1. WotC double-backed on their Essentials push. This was really obvious after
Heroes of Shadows, which was closer to being in-line with the Essentials designs than the original 4e.
Heroes of the Feywild and
Elemental Chaos were obviously trying to straddle the line between the two by providing half-baked ideas in an effort to appease both sides. Looking back at it now, it appeared to be a last-ditch effort to win over with 4e before the abrupt decision to cut everything and move forward with their new plan.
2. Essentials could have benefited more by removing itself further from the preceding products, rather than trying to shoehorn everything into the increasingly conflicted design space. One such area, for example, is feats. If you carve away the previous mountain of extraneous feats and stick with only those provided in the Essentials line, you'll find very few options uniquely designed for arcane, divine, or primal classes. Perhaps there was something planned in the works, but without the previous materials, wizards and clerics have some very dry choices left. The warpriest and cavalier in particular seemed to move away from any real need for implements (holy symbols, or otherwise), at least until the Death domain was introduced in HoS.
3. People who work on implementing the rules for VTTs, whether past or present, are forced to address some of the conflicts between what is accepted, canon, and preferred. For example, does magic item rarity need to be included for items, or just hand waved to allow GM-fiat? This is more obvious to me with Fantasy Grounds, which the ruleset was clearly designed before Essentials was a thing and missed out on a lot of these newer nuances. Obviously, there is little incentive to push for updates or fixes when they can't even sell content to support the ruleset, so we are left figuring out our own solutions.
Regardless, I try to stay focused on the fun aspects that bring me joy to work with 4e again. Part of that has been rediscovering the system and a lot of good content that I missed before. At the same time, the painful realities are brought to light again with these issues that seem to divide and exacerbate problems that I've seen fixed by modern designs and systems.