Looking back at my original post, I should make it clear that the quality of D&D Next is not immaterial to me. Actually, I have a reasonable expectation that 5E will be good-- based on the playtest, my concerns with the rules are tweaks like "fighters (and just fighters) should have opportunity attacks" and "long rests should heal half-HP instead of all", and my concerns are not the basic system itself, which I very much like.
But the thing is, I like lots of games that I don't buy. I even buy lots of games I like but never end up playing much. So when I talk about being "in" or not for Next, I am talking about what I personally want from a new edition of D&D, which is, to not just be a game I like, or a game I play, but the kind of game where I am going to play the hell out of it.
During the heydey of 3.x, I bought lots of RPGs. But mostly, I played D20 stuff. I played the hell out of D20. Not because I thought it was the best game system-- I don't expect D&D to be the best game system, any more than I expect the most popular movie in a year to be the best movie, even if it is a great movie. I loved Avengers, but I doubt I will look back on it as the best film of 2012. I have loved all the versions of D&D, but system-wise, I don't expect any D&D edition in my lifetime to be as good of a flat-out ruleset as Trail of Cthulhu or Dogs in the Vineyard, but I have played a lot more of D&D (and Pathfinder, and other D&D-based stuff) than all other systems put together, mostly since the OGL was released. And there is a reason for this.
I played (and GM'd) D20 because I could do anything with it. Anything.
Just one example: During that era, I ran a D&D Planescape game with the following party: a Melnibonean noble with a demon bound to his shield (from Chaosium's d20 Elric stuff), a Numenorean ranger (from an online adaptation of LoTR, hosted on this site for a while), a Cimmerian pirate (slightly adapted from Mongoose's Conan stuff), a Deep One rogue (using stats from the WotC Call of Cthulhu d20 book), a member of the Night's Watch (from the Dragon magazine Westeros feature and some of the D20 Game of Thrones RPG from Guardians of Order), and red-robed Wizard of High Sorcery (from the licensed D&D Dragonlance 3E book).
And I did not have to make up a single rule. Other than a bit of adapting the Mongoose stuff, my only work was talking about character ideas and writing and running my adventure. This is only the case because of the OGL. I could have spent a lot more time writing rules of my own in that and other games, but that volume of content meant I could focus on other things, and when I did invent or extrapolate rules-wise, all that stuff gave me a much a stronger base to work from.
Every one of the products mentioned above drove my interest back to D&D, and while some of the products were owned by me, and some were owned by the player, you know what every one of us owned? A PHB. Over the life of 3E/3.5, I bought three of those (I bought that intro boxed set just to get the paperback PHB), because D&D was such a huge part of my gaming life. And I also had DMGs, Monster Manuals, splat books, etc. Lots of those. Most from WotC.
In contrast, I've bought three 4E books, period. I have played a lot of other games the last few years, but no one game significantly more than the others, except maybe Pathfinder. I like 4E, but I have played a lot less of it, simply because I have way fewer options with it than I did with 3E or even 2E. Business-wise, TSR made 2E too many campaign settings, but being able to have Al-Qadim, Spelljammer, Planescape, and Charlemagne's Paladins in my back pocket for the same game was awesome in a lot of ways. Relative to all that, what a 4E D&D game can be conceptually is relatively narrow. Not because the 4E designers aren't doing lots of good, imaginative work (they are), but because WotC is rationally not going to do what TSR did, which is release more product than is profitable.
Obviously, I don't expect future D&D editions to go nuts on material like 2E did. But I do want a lot of material to choose from. The OGL solved this issue for 3E. 4E had no equivalent solution, so I played it less, and WotC got less of my money. In some ways, their loss of my dollars was Paizo's gain, but I should reiterate what has been said elsewhere: the OGL didn't create Pathfinder, WotC shunning the OGL created Pathfinder.
So like I said, if there is no OGL, I am not in.
