Yes, it is, obviously, duh. But.... how is it any more "gatekeeping" than the D&D brand being the sole, exclusive property of Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro), whose singular licensing department and executive suite has the exact same authority?
If a private corporation, any private corporation, has a contractual restriction on to whom its owners may sell their interests... who do you think gets to decide to whom they're allowed to sell them to? Not you... and not me...
The uncaring gaze of the company, who's more concerned on profits, allows us to get away with heaps more stuff than it would. Under WotC its caring very much about D&D being popular, so they can do a movie deal and release more movies to get more money. As long as you're not hurting their bottom line, they really don't care what you're doing. That gives people tons of freedom as long as they're not calling it official.
I didn't want to poke at this because its irrelevant to the thread but. Let's analyse your points
I know it's a pipe dream, but a private holding company that only owned two things (Hasbro stock and cash money) could eventually own enough of both that it could force Hasbro to sell Wizards of the Coast to it. The only actual staff the "D&D Brand" needs after the initial setup is skeleton crews to apply errata and order reprints for the major "SRD families" of D&D (B/X, BECMI, Advanced, 3.X, 4e and 5e) and the licensing department. The latter pays for everything else and pays out profit share to the (still private, invite only) shareholders of the holding company.
And your pipe dream is not only impossible (Hasbro will hold onto the D&D license to their dying breath because they hold onto every license that strongly), but your business transaction? That's just going to flood the market with a whole bunch of stuff that is nonsensicle to the general public who care about. You'd get in a TSR situaiton where your company is burning massive amounts of money doing up stuff for stuff that isn't going to sell, all of those other editions are barely going to get any sales in this day and age
What's your actual plan for getting new people into Dungeons and Dragons and presenting to them a unified whole? Because "Here's over 5 different versions that are all incompatible with each other" is the worst business idea I've heard in decades, and let's be honest, even the biggest selling OSR products today are selling fractions of what 5E is doing. You'll be propping up dead products and competing with yourself. This is one of the mistakes TSR made, and its a big part of why its dead
Where does the "new D&D" come from? Everyone who owns any portion of the D&D-- by invitation only-- has the full unilateral right to publish "official D&D" supplements for any of the SRD families. Official D&D trade dress, official D&D edition trade dress, their own publisher trade dress. And SRD or not, anyone who can publish official D&D can use official D&D in their official D&D products. Once a decade, staggered, the shareholders update the SRDs and the core rulebooks with new material and publish a "new edition" (AD&D 1e -> 2e or 3.0 -> 3.5; not 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5) and decide whether or not the family tree needs new branches.
So you're just slapping the D&D license on anything if its one of those people? This is incredibly, incredibly exploitable. You've now given folks carte blanche to publish whatever they want and you're implicitly licensing it. Hey, what if someone does something along the lines of Drums on Fire Mountain, the "Wow this old adventure is incredibly racist against islanders", or OA's hot mess that are still popping up to this day even with WotC just trying to douse them with "Yeah we just put this up for sale for archival purposes". How are you going to handle that backlash? There's no directors here, there's no legal team, there's no team given the very specific task of checking these and making sure no one's Trojan Horsing it to go and publish something more at home in the NuTSR thread.
You've stuck the D&D license on it, you've given it your tactic stamp of approval as an Official D&D Product that is now incredibly racist and is being dragged across media. Can't just 'oh we shareholder' the way out of that, having no oversight over what's being done is how we got the Spelljammer mess. And that's before someone just comits fraud and rips off Disney and sticks it in the book, leading the Mouse's lawyers coming a hunting for blood. How are you going to get out of that mess? Who's going to organise the lawyers and legal fees and snap someone off who, per all this detail, is now a shareholder of the company you have to throw to the wolves because they messed up and had no oversight?
Larian wants to make Pirates of Realmspace 2, Owlcat wants to make Pathfinder: Serpent's Skull, they don't pay out massive licensing fees to Official D&D, they're shareholders. Their marketing budget is our marketing budget, the tie-ins are organized in advance, and the open license third-party ecosystem is a constant source of new blood for the-- invite only-- Official D&D brand.
Which is going to either dilute your brand's reputation to absurdity, like we actively saw during 3E, or lead to it being tainted. I'm just saying, folks didn't except BG3 to sell well not due to anything on the company, but because every D&D video game since Neverwinter Nights 2 had been awful and it was just expected it'd follow suit. To say nothing for the invite only thing inevitably circulating power in the hands of a few and just leading to an in-group who need to be appeased and only care about that appeasement, not whether it makes money, whereas at least WotC's profit-driven margin gets them getting new people in to get fresh ideas to keep the game going longer.
