While I agree with main point, that corporations if want us to buy from them, need to provide a product we want / think is worth the price they are charging for, I am a little confused and possibly just haven't followed the converstaion well enough.
Where I'm confused, is what has removed the trust that they will produce a book that is worth the money.
I already said: Spelljammer. They didn't include any of the 2e lore (such as the space-factions and space-religions) and they also didn't create
new lore to replace it. I didn't read the adventure (someone else at my table had originally planned on running it) but I've heard it's terribly rail-roady--the potential DM certainly said it was pretty bad. The monsters were incredibly lackluster and included a cosmic horror that was reduced to nothing more than a boring combat monster; several of the monsters updated from 2e had most of their personality stripped away and also became little more than combat monsters--and many of those monsters were actually from Dark Sun, which suggests that
that setting is going to be cut short as well, should it ever get published. The books lacked mechanics for space combat. They failed to go into details about solar systems, thus moving away from some of what made Spelljammer interesting--the idea that you could legitimately have discworlds or cube-shaped suns or planets resting on clockwork machinery. And they used thick paper and divided into three books to hide the fact that it had a very low page count.
It had 64 fewer pages than VGR and cost $20 more. I would have taken thinner pages or a single book for a lower price, because that slipcase and extra binding wasn't worth $20 in and of itself.
And that's
ignoring their screw-up with the hadozee. I'm more than willing to accept it was just a dumb mistake that happened because they didn't have a sensitivity reader look over it, and that they'll use one in the future as they've promised to do.
Please note that I am not talking about just things I don't like. I'm not
fond of the loss of crystal spheres and putting Wild Space (and thus the Material Plane) in the Astral, but that's purely a matter of personal taste and I can easily ignore it, adapt it, or learn to accept it. I'm talking about actual lack of included material. To go back to cosmic horrors for a moment--they had two small paragraphs of flavor text. I can't help but think that in earlier editions, even earlier in 5e, there would have been two paragraphs on the cults that spring up around them. The section on dead gods is also a mere two paragraphs long, and I'm positive that there would have been a chapter about them in an earlier edition--in fact, there
was a 5-page-long chapter on dead gods in the 2e Planescape book Guide To The Astral Plane.
If that is due to recent book releases not being up to scratch, so no longer have that trust, then I can follow - but if it is due to this OGL situation, then I don't quite follow - as while I can see it can have an impact on overall trust, I don't see why it would dent any trust in the quality of books they produce - as this is separate to the OGL to my mind.
It's about
both. They've shown they're untrustworthy on two different fronts. Maybe even a third, if those recent tweets about WotC having a hostile work environment are true.
If I was a 3rd party publisher, I would have lost trust that I could continue to publish material for D&D outside of 5.1, but that is separate to just buying WOTC books to my mind.
See, I
am. I mean, I've only published a single book, and it was for Level Up, so I'm
also waiting for LU to finalize whatever their dealings are with ORC, or whatever license they choose (I don't know what's involved on their end), before I complete my second book. And even though I was never going to be even a blip on WotC's radar (my first book has given me enough money to not feel guilty about spending money on new gaming books, if they're on sale), their willingness to screw with other 3pps means that I can't trust them to not try to do it again. Even if they can't do it with 5e-based books now, because of the CC, they can do it with One-based books in the near future.