What they appear to have done was decide, “Pre-4e Forgotten Realms is more popular than 4e FR. But we don’t want to ruin our line of novels by rebooting it back and declaring 4e an alternate multiverse. Plus, we ruined any chance of making all of our hard core fans happy as soon as we created a 4e FR and split the fan base. So we mainly have to just focus on novels and more casual fans.
Lets do this. We‘ll say in-multiverse stuff happens that reboots the general feel of the world to its most popular and iconic timeframe, without actually changing the timeline, so we can maintain continuity with the novels. We shall bring back all organizations that were iconic, make sure the nations and city states all feel familiar, etc. We can even bring back from the dead a bunch of popular human heroes who probably should have died of old age and therefore be ineligible for resurrection magic a century or so ago. We’ll come up with some ’It’s magic!’ explanation in the future if people really start wondering, but the casual fans aren’t likely to care much, so we can worry about that if and when it happens.
But we also want to keep the gonzo stuff from 4e, like dragonborn and tieflings walking around all normal like. People seem into that. We’ll need to make a point of saying that stuff is still around, and prominently feature them.
It‘ll work, trust me.”
And, judging by how infrequently topics like this even come up, it seems like it has worked; and I really do attribute that to the brand essentially de-emphasizing addressing hardcore fans, and focusing almost exclusively on the casual gamer at this point. It didn’t start that way. They started off the play test trying to focus on all sorts of gamers, but I feel like a couple of years after the game was out, once it was a juggernaut drawing in new casual players in swarms, they haven’t really cared to address the interests of the more hardcore fans.
Lest anyone misunderstand, I’m not being critical of casual players or saying they should be required to be familiar with a bunch of lore to get into the game. What I do claim is that a product (especially in the lore area) that will appeal to the hardcore fans will also appeal to the casual players—but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. So ideally for the game as art you’d focus on making a product that the hardcore fans approve of, and it will be just as popular with the casual fans. Unfortunately, because the game is so big now, they probably literally are not being paid to put that much effort into making it a work of art. The financial pay-off at this particular point is likely seen as not justifying more focused effort on continuity and similar issues. Right now the product is on fire, and if anyone is saying anything, it’s probably along the lines of “Don’t put time or money into cleaning up the details or try to capture any sort of artistic vision. Just maintain a consistent level of product approval and sales.”
I realize that the world runs on money, but I do not have to like it.