Based on my brother's copies, I've spent the money elsewhere that I'd set aside for buying the 4E core books. As I predicted it's "Eberron: The Game" with dragonborn standing in for warforged, and all sorts of thematic incoherency and quirkiness which is there for background reasons of marketing compromise (just like Eberron).
If they'd just overhauled the rules I would have been cool with that, but they've overhauled the rules and the flavour too much. Why tieflings, eladrin, half-elves and dragonborn? Why CE and LG? It's all so arbitrary. It's not a world I can believe in automatically without expending concious effort to do so. I understand that you can't give everyone everything at once to suit all tastes, and that there are reasons for supplying default gods to newbie players, but the first books should have at least been more classic than they are.
It's like they've forgotten the 2E lesson of people not being interested in TSR's worldbuilding. I hope WOTC eventually realises that they should leave the fun worldbuilding to the players (and yes, pretending that dragonborn and tieflings exist everywhere is big-time worldbuilding), and make rules to do the drudgework. Players adore making maps and gods and choosing races and wallowing in macro level worldbuilding stuff which is useless to play. Generative rules which filled in the "hard work" gap not covered by those things would have been my ideal next edition.
Kudos for the combat system, it's a lot more fun than the old one. But that's not all that D&D is about; 5E should focus on the exploration aspect in equal measure, and a DMG packed to the gills with encounter-generating tables for a Dungeon, Wilderness and Urban world of adventure would support that (and I mean to the hilt, for a game which is by default played improvised...with no need to generate maps, DMs love doing that themselves). Perhaps that's not practical, but I can dream.
And why is there still dross like the chuul, destrachan and chokers in the MM for goodness sake?? It's the phantom fungus principle - it doesn't matter if you meet a design goal with a monster if it sucks thematically, it still won't get used. It's clear to me that not much was learnt from 3E in this respect, or maybe there's some sort of obscure Cthulhu chic about these monsters that the designers see that I'm not digging. You left out adventure-driving monsters like the leprechaun (the hook for at least half a dozen Dungeon Magazine adventures from memory) for this?
I was reading about D&Desque board games today such as Talisman, Prophecy, Descent and Runebound, looking for a replacement for D&D, and they were described as balancing combat and exploration. The latter is the missing part of your equation, WOTC - I hope it's your direction for 5E. Without it, you get 4E's "hollow shell" feel.
Maybe next edition.
