And your ignoring evidence in front of your eyes.
You can suspect whatever you like. Evidence, you have not provided. So the answer is none. The very fact that Mearls DID work for a popular OGL author shows exact that his talent did get noticed.
Prior to that it wasnt easy to get noticed. OGL changed that.
No, it WAS easy to get noticed, as long as theres a market for gaming. There was always the equivalent of the farm team or the minor leagues when it came to game design. Dragon Magazine lead to a lot of people accepting jobs at TSR. Smaller game shops ended up providing a body of work that would allow people to get hired at TSR or WoTC. I can give you many examples like I did with people like Warren Spector, Roger Moore, etc.
The only single thing the OGL did was make it easier to both produce a more exact clone of D&D (with permission) or make supplemental products, and for existing WoTC staffers to branch out on their own. But the farm team or minor leagues
already existed. The OGL in itself did not increase the number of people taking part in these markets, just shifted the locations and make-up of them.
I have yet to see solid evidence that the gaming market expanded under the OGL, in terms of numbers. From what I saw a lot of new publishers showed up but other publishers folded and some flamed out fast. Was the market for the RPG under the OGL bigger than it was in the 1970s-1990s? Again, the OGL is just a legal license. Most people don't give a crap about it, they either contribute to gaming as a hobby because they love it and/or want to make money writing for it. That's always existed, beyond the licenses.
ByronD said:
I think e-books will replace books over time and I think it will happen faster in RPGs than in books at large. But people will still be printing out particular selections, character sheets, references, whatever, for a very long time to come.
It's not a question of whether "print will die", but which areas of print will be replaced. Clearly paper is being replaced in areas where it is conveinent--e-mail has replaced much correspondence, and newspapers are moving to on-line formats. You can also expect low-selling niche hobbies to move more towards on-line than you can with bestsellers--or to become extinct. And it will also depend on what new technologies come out that make it easier to read digital copies instead of printing out sheets.