EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
You started off fine. Classic aesthetics is fine, 3e PHB + Warlord would be fine (if very big), most folks prefer the MM3/MV math.I would have given it another year or so in the development phase and released tokens like they did with Essentials, had the PHB actually be a classic style PHB with the original core classes and improved monster math they implemented. Then avoided the Windows like patches that came out every few months to fix issues that came up in play and feat taxes they issued to fix the math. The magic item economy was too ingrained in the math so that would have been fixed.
Ok I would have released 5e.
I genuinely do not understand the "Windows like patches" complaint. Would you seriously prefer that they leave in stuff like an accidental infinite damage loop because they didn't catch it before publication?
"Feat taxes" IMO are a fan-created problem with a fan-created anger at the solution meant to fix the fan-created problem. That is, I am genuinely convinced that they WANTED it to get (very, very slightly) harder at baseline over the tiers. (Keep in mind, it's only about +1 every 10 levels!) This was meant to make it so you were soft-encouraged to actually use teamwork--at early levels, it's super effective but not absolutely required, but in Epic tier, if you aren't actually synergizing with your allies, you WILL suffer for it.
But people got their knickers in a twist about it......despite ALSO complaining that the challenge was in lockstep. Literally unpleasable fans.
You describe the magic items as though they need to be fixed. They don't. You can literally run 4e without magic items of any kind. It's called inherent bonuses ("A Reward-Based Game" is the official sidebar), and it was included as a variant rule in DMG2. Which was published in 2009. Literally only a year after 4e launched (DMG1: June 2008.)