Questions for the designers.

[Aeolius]

I think a dragon with rusty, corroded scales would be AWESOME.

As would a bronze dragon with a nice patina.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I noticed the OP mentioned that some people think D&D is drawing from the Harry Dresden novels/series - whether they're drawing from them directly is open to question, but they're clearly inspired by the same sources, and given the publishing date of the Dresden stuff (starting 2001 in the US), and their popularity, I'd strongly suspect they were are an influence on the development of Wizard-types.

I mean, Harry is clearly both "cool" and a self-declared wizard, a rare combination. He uses both ritual and spontaneous magic, and I think particularly he uses a number of implements for different types of magic (I think his mileux is actually inspired by WoD LARP games, which the author plays, which makes this a kind of funny circle) in a way that, reading the first two books in the last few days, immediately brought to mind 3E.

 

[rkanodia]

Sodium dragon.

You owe me a new keyboard. I can only imagine what the 'Ecology' section will look like

 

[helium3]

Well, silver is super shiny.
Iron is a dull gray.
Adamantine is dark, nearly black.

This reminds me of a funny story. About half-way through a campaign that was heavy on Drow elements, our entire group simultaneously realized that there were two distinct ideas about what Adamantine looked like in play. Half of us thought it was a dull black metal and the other half thought it was a gray metal with swirly silver streaks in it.

After much discussion, it turned out that what a person thought Adamantine looked like depended on how they were exposed to the concept. People that first heard of the stuff from the FR novels though it was black. People that had first heard of it thanks to the X-Men (in particular the movies) thought it was gray with silver streaks and whorls.

It was so weird to realize that for several months we'd been talking about the same thing but imagining something entirely different.