The Faerun books are a likely consequence of the previous leads leaving.
Crawford/Perkins clearly embraced the "power creep is good design!" philosophy, to the point that UAs released after the PHB were already more power-creeped than the already-power-creeped PHB content.
Meanwhile, after the new folks took the helm, UAs took a distinct shift into bland, mediocre power-wise. As if the new folks are reluctant to push the power envelope in the way Crawford/Perkins embraced it, or perhaps had higher-ups tell them that the power-creep was a turn-off for many players.
The end result is that Heroes of Faerun is wildly unbalanced. You have extremely strong faction feat lines (the Spellfire and Zhentarium lines, for instance), ones that are overly situational or needlessly restrictive (the Harper or Dragon Cult lines), and ones that are complete garbage (the Flaming Fist or Emerald Enclave lines). You have circle casting, which is a mechanic that lets casters completely break the game while martials sit by and get scorned by their allies for not having spell slots. You have the Banneret and the Oath of Nobly Not Caring About Thematic Conventions in the same sourcebook.
Then you have Astarion's Book of Homophobic Tropes Hungers, where the designers didn't think a feat focused on throwing weapons would be something a Strength-focused character could possibly want. You have Lorwyn: First Light, where one of the new species gets a feature that doesn't actually work because the designers seem to have forgotten how features of the intended nature are worded and why.
And all throughout, we have species, classes, subclasses, feats, items, that all think the most interesting thing the game can give a player is "cast this spell".
So no, at best the design direction is merely shifting course from "blind power-creep" to "mediocrity and generifying existing content". Which, I suppose is nice for the type of player who wants tanking-focused subclasses to be made better for meta DPR builds and worse for sword-and-board PCs.
