Quickleaf
Legend
It could be we're the idiosyncratic ones, and they're moving with the mainstream!I suspect the main issue is that 5E's designer have a somewhat idiosyncratic view of what the major issues with 5E are, based on what they presented to us and how much was rejected out of hand, which doesn't give the impression that they're rushing it (whereas 4E and 5E they basically stated outright that they did), but certainly doesn't gove the impression of focused work.
I rather hope I'll be blown away by the actual product though, so of course reserve judgement.
Interesting that they seem to have dropped the idea of MM or DMG public playtests despite surprising us by saying they were doing them fairly recently. Perhaps they are still to come through?
I recall the PAX presentation on D&D2024Next5.5 last year where they fielded a question about rules support for non-combat pillars of play (interaction & exploration), and they mentioned that they'd developed a whole exploration subsystem but found that it was too rules/procedure intense and that slowed down the game... And therefor they decided that exploration rules/procedures don't work for D&D. I'm paraphrasing.
I was flabbergasted. They almost literally said "we designed complicated exploration rules" in one breath, then in the next said "therefor exploration rules don't work." I had whiplash from the logical incongruity. Like...design it simpler maybe?
One of the issues I've had with the playtests – and I've had several – is that certain things they would kill on the cutting floor fast (or never even made it out of closed testing), while other things they iterated on and iterated on publicly.