In my experience as a parent, both. Often, they are the same thing. The big things when I was a kid were Pokémon and Nonja Turtles, and the big things with kids now are Pokémon and Ninja Turtles, and stuff ripping off Pokémon and Ninja Turtles.
Are you thus saying that
nothing whatsoever has changed about Pokemon and Ninja Turtles over the years?
Because I assure you,
plenty has changed. And, surprise surprise, a lot of that has been improving the balance of the Pokemon games and dealing with legacy problematic elements, to the point that many fans of classic Pokemon are no longer happy with its current direction or content. ("Dexit" was a HUGE rigamarole that went completely unnoticed by most people whose first game was Sword/Shield.) Further, plenty of major cultural touchstones for people in their 40s are
completely irrelevant today: Fat Albert, Shazam!, Grape Ape, some even I have never heard of like
Lidsville or
Battle of the Planets. On the literature front, many of the classics from the 70s and 80s are not as widely-read today (the Green-Sky Trilogy,
A Wizard of Earthsea, etc.), even if ideas from them have trickled into the overall zeitgeist (e.g.
Dragonriders of Pern).
D&D's demographics have shifted, a lot. I assume you grant this, given you have emphasized the growing number of participants. If 89% of the fanbase is people who literally
physically couldn't have played anything earlier than late-2e, the creators are going to pivot to attending to that overwhelming majority. It's not hard to see this in action: stuff like drow, which remained pretty blatantly anti-feminist for decades, suddenly got some
major attention. Adventures are tending toward somewhat brighter colors and more obviously heroic heroes, even as they consider things like politics and associated difficulties.
And that isn't the only aspect; much of the
design and
structure, and in particular the motives for these things, just isn't relevant to that 89% majority that is under the age of 40. For example, many folks now playing D&D literally haven't got the first concept of what an edition war is. They've no idea they're supposed to hate 4e or love 2e or whatever. They have no context for legacy design elements, particularly if those legacy design elements never found their way out into the wider zeitgeist of computer RPGs. So, while Wizards will probably never gain the ability to cast healing spells (because that design quirk
has entered the collective unconscious of game design), people aren't likely to be so fixated on the power of something like
fire ball when, from their perspective, that's just one staple spell among many, not a major game-changer. Questions as to why it's so hard for Wizards to use armor or why Fighters don't get their own neat powers are quite plausible, because they've been exposed to games like
World of Warcraft and
Final Fantasy XIV and
Guild Wars 2 (among many,
many others) where that simply isn't true, where "fighter" characters (for some reason, always called "Warriors" rather than "Fighters," not sure why) have all sorts of impressive effects they can draw upon. Likewise, the fact that all spellcasters
have to be complicated is probably going to get some pushback from all the folks who grew up reading
Harry Potter and seeing how
he practices such effortless, ultra-straightforward magic.
This is the heart of what Minigiant is saying.
The game is now mostly in the hands of people who literally cannot physically be old enough to have played much "old school" D&D. Their ideas and interests not only can, but
will diverge from older ideas in various ways, and WotC isn't stupid, they're going to market to whatever they believe that 8.8x larger audience wants. It's absolutely the case that SOME of the classic stuff will remain--some of it because it was just good to begin with, some of it because it's become standardized fantasy gaming boilerplate, some of it because it's already familiar to them through other non-D&D games, and some because it's just the way things were and new players just happened not to question it.
But if you think even for a
second that the game was already "98% perfect" for that larger audience, you're fooling yourself. The recent tempest in a teapot over the "cutesy" art and "Disneyfied" content for D&D are, quite literally, some of those old-school players getting antsy because
their priorities are no longer the
top priorities. Doesn't mean their priorities are irrelevant. But it does mean that WotC understands that there's a
gap here.
5e was designed to appease the old-school crowd. It succeeded. It also, partially by coincidence, succeeded at growing an enormous
completely not at all old-school audience, one that literally physically
cannot be old-school because they aren't old enough. Some of those folks absolutely will jump at the chance to play old-school stuff because "is at least 40 years old" and "likes old-school things" are orthogonal things. But a lot of them
won't jump at that, and thus, 5e is evolving in directions that appeal to folks whose interests aren't particularly rooted in old-school sentiments.
