What exactly do you consider to be the gold standard of unique and original D&D material that has been released by whatever company over the last however many years? I imagine there must be some things you give a wholehearted thumbs up to? You're still playing the game so there's gotta be something that's been floating your boat this entire time, right?
I'm not sure why you're asking this in response to me pointing out a response
from players to certain material is highly predictable and repetitive? The WotC material here is okay. It is itself neither particularly trite nor particularly original. The issue I have is that whenever a class or ability appears that lets you make things larger, players immediately seize on the idea of making size S PCs as large as possible, and I find that to be trite and boring, myself. I guess as it happens constantly and completely predictably, I should get over it, but maybe my response to it is equally predictable!
Or did you quote the wrong bit or something? I believe I made a post expressing concern about WotC's ability to create original worlds/settings earlier, though I can't recall if it was in this thread. If you're asking about that, fine, but the quote is odd, because that is about players, not about WotC.
EDIT - Presuming the quote was unrelated, I would say the last time WotC reached the "gold standard of originality with a setting" was the fifth of never.
I'm not even saying that to be jerk! I genuinely cannot think of a "gold standard original" WotC setting. 4E was the closest WotC has been, by far, what the Feywild and the Shadowfell, and the Elemental Chaos and so on and so forth it seemed like it was on the way there. But they never made an actual setting out of it, just a vague implied setting, and that implied setting (The Nentir Vale) was definitely not gold-standard original, and as the edition went on, originality declined as much as it increased (for example in using the poorly-developed and low-imagination three-letter acronym version Monte Cook version of Sigil, rather either the more visionary original, or a novel take).
One of the reasons I'm less of a fan of D&D than I used to be is that WotC don't really do original settings. First let's put aside MtG - all the settings for that are intentionally somewhat trite/predictable. This is a feature not a bug. They're all "MtG does X", like MtG picks a genre or vibe and does it in a peculiar and predictable MtG way, which is very limited and delineated by the bounds of the MtG magic system and so on. Most of their settings are "fine". They're fundamentally unexciting. Theros was more interesting than most, Ravnica less than most (particularly as it is a "poor man's Sigil" - the poverty in this case being of imagination). Going forwards it looks like MtG is going to maybe abandon even that in favour of using existing non-MtG IPs, returning to existing MtG settings, and so on.
Anyway, if WotC did original settings more, they'd get more money out of me. Eberron was,
for what it was, probably gold-standard. What is was required to be though was a completely 3E-friendly kitchen-sink setting. I'd say that within those bounds, it was gold-standard. But that was in 2004 and "within those bounds". If you look at fantasy settings on a larger scale, it doesn't make the cut, quite, imho. Before that TSR did a few genuinely original settings. Planescape obviously, I don't think anyone is seriously going to challenge the idea that in 1994, that was a gold-standard original (not platinum standard sure but...). If anything it was before its time, and since then many of the ideas it showed off have become commonplace, and it has been much emulated (WotC have like, what at least three "poor man's Sigil"-type places?). Dark Sun was also, whilst inspired by a lot of things, very original for its time period, and the more you look at the setting, the easier that becomes to defend, too. I'd argue personally that Taladas, despite being part of the deeply-trite Dragonlance setting, and using a lot of fantasy and historical ideas, ended up with something that, for the period, was a highly original vision. In 1989 that is a gold standard.
Is it harder to reach a gold standard now? Yes, probably. But honestly I'd be happy with a silver standard original like Eberron. I suspect we'll get bronze standard at most, and "no medal" standard is more likely.
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