I'm not quite as cynical about more nefarious motives, but I think the logistics of integrating different rules "plugins" will still be difficult for everyone, particularly PbP. It might be straightforward for an individual gaming group to decide on the rulesets that work for them, but how do you do that in a living world with many DM's?When they say the DM's can make the game as rules heavy or "rules-lite" I just read that as:
"We will have a crap ton of optional splatbooks that may or may not contain the best player options that make it practically mandatory so that we can take your hard-earned moneyz"
I don't know how it will all work out, but I'm actually kind of excited about the possibility of different types of branded video games, online or otherwise, that are free to explore different styles of play by using different rulesets.