You make a distinction here. The distinction is:
No offense, but it's clear at this point that English is not your first language and you're operating across a language barrier. And there comes a point at which trying to communicate across that language barrier is a lost cause. This is that point.
Logically, this distinction means that if they abandon the OGL they should not publish something new, aka go on with what they were having going on, which is nothing else but 3.5e.
For example, my original post explicitly contradicts your "logical" conclusion here. Which means that it isn't logical.
I have pointed this out to you before. Yet you persist in claiming that you can read my mind and that I actually meant something completely contrary to what I wrote.
There's not much more to discuss at that point.
Imagine if you could market your product as a game that has the best elements of 4e while retaining the more attractive ones of 3.5e and succeed in that.
You can do that right now. Since game mechanics can't be copyrighted, nothing's stopping you.
But you will very quickly discover that figuring what constitutes the "best elements of 4e" and the "more attractive ones of 3.5e" is essentially impossible because it represents a personal value judgment. And many of the things which people who play 4e consider "the best elements of 4e" are fundamentally incompatible with the "more attractive ones of 3.5e" that made people stick with that system.
You describe this as a mistake. But what I find interesting is the possibility that WotC had already formed the view that they were under threat from something like Pathfinder so long as they continued to publish rules that (more-or-less) fitted onto the OGL-governed SRD.
One reason to suppose that they had this belief is that it would then make their decision to publish a game which was reasonably discontinuous from the d20 SRD, and which was not itself licensed under the OGL, a rational one from their perspective.
In terms of the specific context of "try to prevent something like
Pathfinder" I think WotC's decision to simultaneously drop AND publish a radically new fantasy RPG was pretty much the
worst way to do it. WotC obviously believed otherwise, but that doesn't mean they weren't dead wrong.
A few points:
(1) Paizo was not the first publisher to repackage the core rules and publish them. At least two other publishers did that from 2000-2008 and there were probably others that I'm unaware of. And there were others who tried to publish various flavors of "D&D... but slightly improved!". None of them were successful. None of them significantly impacted WotC's market. None of them enjoyed the success which Pathfinder has enjoyed.
I feel fairly confident in saying that no such project
would succeed in yanking away substantial portions of WotC's marketshare, as long as WotC remained at the top of the pyramid. It was only by vacating that position that WotC made Pathfinder possible.
(2) The transition from 3.0 to 3.5 makes it fairly apparent that even
minor shifts in mechanics were widely perceived as rendering older material out of date. A hypothetical-4E that maintained 1974-2008 gameplay could still have changed enough to render 3.5 material into dustbin material.
(3) Could a hypothetical-4E that was closer to 3.5 have allowed people to use the OGL to "clone" the system? Maybe. But newsflash: People have been publishing off-brand D&D supplements since 1975. There are people publishing D&D clones
right now that don't use the OGL.
So, to sum up:
If WotC had done real-4E and released it under an OGL, I don't think Pathfinder happens. I think Paizo and the rest of the major players in the industry (the people who could actually make something like Pathfinder happen) would simply move on to 4th Edition. WotC would probably still have lost 3.5 players like me, but the level of product support for people like us would be more on the level of the OSR retro-clones than Pathfinder.
If WotC had done a hypothetical-4E and NOT released it under the OGL, someone might have tried for something like Pathfinder. But I think WotC would have been far more successful at converting their player base, who (as with the transition from 3.0 to 3.5) would view the older material as being incompatible enough to not interest them.
Alternatively, I suspect that WotC could have released a hypothetical-4E (with 1974-2008 gameplay) and coupled it to a poison pill GSL that allowed them to pull the license at some future date. Between a more successful conversion of the player base and a likelihood of luring major players onboard, WotC might have given themselves a graceful exit plan from the OGL-era.
Ironically, buying patterns in the DDI era make it clear that WotC could have
easily gotten away with hypothetical-4E and no third-party licensing at all. Semi-compatible clone support would wither on the vine even more painfully in the wake of people preferring DDI-supported options than the fully-compatible GSL material available today. But here I can say that nobody could have reliably predicted this effect of DDI.
