If you explore a bank robbery or murder, people can get upset over you exploring it too, not just about you committing it.
Let's not try and make an analogy to inchoate crimes, unless you know what you're talking about. Also, this isn't a crime.
The terms were very draconic, they did not have a legal leg to stand on as far as revoking 1.0 (that was just posturing to pressure people into 1.1),
That's not exactly true. For reasons that were discussed ... in far too much detail here previously ... they did have a legal leg to stand on due to the issues with the OGL 1.0 and subsequent caselaw. Which is why, when they ended up going in a different direction, they went with the Creative Commons license.
and in their communication they were very firm that they would at best budge very little. So no, that was not an open ended exploration, it was an attempt at strong-arming which they lost as they turned out to be in the weaker position.
Again, as has been subsequently discussed, there were internal ...
issues ... within WoTC at the time. Let's call them divisions. As far as we know, the choice to change direction was not because of legal reasons, but was because the external pressure from the community empowered the other people within WoTC in terms of direction.
Companies are people. Often a lot of people. With different thoughts and different agendas.
I grant them that they recovered and released the SRD under CC, but this was more than a friendly discussion among peers that they just started awkwardly
I will finish this by noting the obvious- there is something fundamentally wrong when we see a company propose doing a thing we believe to be incorrect, we mobilize people to argue against it, we successfully persuade the company to do ... not just the right thing, but to go above and beyond, and then choose to forever denounce the company because they ... what, listened to us?
It has been my observation that there are people (many of whom do not play D&D) who have an interest in taking WoTC down a peg*. Parasocial relationships are a helluva drug. And for that reason, they take every opportunity to try and re-litigate something that did not happen. But that's not really the purpose of this thread. If you want to be a hater, feel free to hate.** But you're not likely to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
*Just as there are people who love WoTC no matter what they do.
**I would say, "Hate the players, not the game," but ... um ... weirdly, this is the one context where that is certainly not the appropriate saying.