Pathfinder 1E Publishers of D&D: from past to future. Paizo and Wotc.

[prosfilaes]

I'd be interested in where you got this information, and more importantly... who was it that ran these taste tests and how wide a sample size did they use?

Try Coca-cola’s Big Mistake: New Coke 20 Years Later. | The New York 10 - Directory of Restaurants, Businesses, Services, and Everything Else You Can Imagine in New York City, NY for one source.

What, you thought that the Coca-Cola company changed the formula on the biggest cola on the market and didn't bother with taste tests first?

Because I do not seem to recall the problem being when it was released that "this new Coke tastes SO much better than the old one, but the can just says 'Coke' and not 'Coca-Cola' on it anymore, so I'm not going to buy it." The problem for most people as far as I remember living through it was actually "this soda sucks."

If it was that New Coke sucks, why did they choose it in a taste test? Why were they switching from old-school Coke to Pepsi, which was more like New Coke? Why did they switch back from Pepsi to Coke Classic after the New Coke debacle? That may have been the perception, but the evidence shows that taste-wise, independent of everything else, New Coke was better.

Comparing 'good' to 'great' is pointless. In both cases it implies they are at least trying to create a quality product, and it all comes down to perception whether one ends up being 'good' and one ends up being 'great'.

Just the fact that you're choosing to produce something for D&D can knock it down from great to good. It introduces all sorts of constraints, prevent all sorts of solutions. GURPS Goblins sold better than Goblins: the RPG would have, but was a worse game for beating its head against the constraints of the GURPS system.

Comparing great to crappy is pointless; great is always going to be better, and nobody wants to produce crappy. But it's easy to produce good, but the constraints of an existing system can easily get in the way of doing great.