D&D 5E Release date?

[Li Shenron]

Also considering that 5E won't have the systematic complexity of 3E or the tactical complexity of 4E, I'm hoping the game is designed just so it can be mastered in an afternoon of guided play.

The common rules everybody should probably know are very few: combat initiative structure and action economy (2 minutes to learn), abilities check-based resolution (1 minute), dis/advantage (1 minute), resting and hit dice-based healing (5 minutes), how to make an attack (2 minutes), and not much else.

Combat actions other than attacks and move, are not strictly needed, although obviously the martial types are probably interested in knowing some more of them. Still, they are not that many. 'Ready an action' is the most complicated of the bunch, but you don't need to know it in advance.

Spellcasters have a harder time. Players have to learn what are daily spell slots, how different they are from 'prepared spells', and that cantrips are an exception. Also they should learn how rituals work and the concentration rules, but these two are needed only if they actually have some rituals and some concentration spells among the spells known (which, at 1st level, might not be everybody's case). You never need to remember how each spell works exactly, but at least taking a look at the text once before playing is quite important.

Then each PC typically only has 1-2 special abilities at 1st level, takes a couple of minutes to familiarize.

Of course, if the players actually have to go through the process of character creation rather than using pre-gens, that is going to take much longer than learn all of the above.

Another anecdotal evidence: my wife had never played a RPG before; after two sessions of DnD Next, she navigates her character sheet easily and is already explaining the concepts to other people. Obviously, I treat things such as background and subclass as part of being a human fighter instead of trying to give further detail.

That's a very good idea to ease a beginner's life. Although understanding the background and the subclasses rules is a piece of cake... the subsystems are really trivial. What can puzzle the beginner, is asking them to pick a background (or pick skills) from a long list.

IMHO if you let them pick a background, it's best only to show them the list of background names, hiding all the details about the benefits, and let them choose by the concept.

BTW, I really hope that the 5e PHB continues the 3e tradition of having a short one-line description of spells, for instance in the class spells lists. That was immensely useful to us back then, to avoid reading through tons of spells and choosing instead by the general purpose.