I don’t have the energy for the logical leaps you’re going on.
Please extrapolate the reasoning at play here, because nothing that you are saying in reply to me in this thread follows from what I posted.
Alright. Just want to be clear, you asked for the long-form explanation!
Crawford has, explicitly and publicly (on film, even!), admitted that the existing Warlock is unable to keep up with other classes, specifically long-rest-based ones, because it was designed presuming a certain minimum number of short rests before each long rest (somewhere around 2.5 average SR per LR), but actual player practice does not match this assumption. He explicitly said that part of the reason for doing the "One D&D" playtest was to find ways to address this problem, so that Warlocks in general would better match other classes in play. Likewise, he explicitly discussed the problems folks have had with other classes, like Ranger, and how these playtest efforts are, in part, to fix those problems. All of this was quite clearly laid out before they produced the first playtest packet, so folks would know what the goals of the playtest were. The original versions of these classes, in multiple cases, are not forwards-compatible with the new ones. At the very least, subclasses can't be ported between them, whether because their features have changed or because the levels at which you get features have changed. Druid, for example, is getting a pretty major overhaul due to the uneven and spiky power of wild shape.
You cannot address these problems by providing an
alternative. Anyone not using the alternative is still at risk of those problems. Hence, as one of the
explicit purposes was to address these design shortfalls, to make the design of this system more effectively conform to how people actually
use it, it is necessarily a replacement, not an augmentation. It does, I freely admit,
also contain augmentations of the existing rules, as well as integrating already extant errata into the text itself.
The "this is a replacement" effect is also distinctly visible with backgrounds. The official stance on backgrounds, from here on out, is that they provide feats. If you want to use a prior background, it will need to be altered so that it provides a feat, unless you just aren't using the "2024" rules. If you're going to play with
anyone using the new-style backgrounds, then purely for fairness,
everyone will need to. Old backgrounds (well, the vast majority of them) are not forwards-compatible; new backgrounds, however, are backwards-compatible, since a few current backgrounds do in fact provide a feat, e.g. the Strixhaven student one.
I cannot parse these changes as anything other than replacements, based on the actual words and intent of the designers. Yet they insist that such changes absolutely are not replacements, in defiance of both their own intent and words. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that at least one of those things is false. Either they truly aren't replacements and the explicit intent has been false the whole time, or they are replacements and the insistence that they are not is insincere. Given the changes they have implemented
do work toward their stated intent (IMO often only partial measures, but partial is better than nothing), I cannot reject their explicit statements of intent as having been false; they appear to genuinely see these things as problems and want to fix them.
That leaves me no choice but to treat their insistence that this is absolutely not a replacement in any form as being insincere. This, then, forces me to ask why. What is gained from such denial of what is demonstrably true? And the answer is quite simple; not only that, but even implied by what WotC has said both recently and in prior years. The thing gained is that WotC does not perturb (offend, confuse, etc.) customers who might buy new things other than the new core books, or old things prior to the new core books. Remember, they had toyed with the idea of just calling 5e "D&D," without any edition at all, but (IMO quite wisely) avoided doing so. They're hoping to have their cake and eat it too: they can say they are taking steps to address problems, but they dodge the backlash and controversy that surrounded 3.5e (e.g. the claims of "cash grab" or "taking books away" etc.), and any hypothetical lost sales from the possibility that a confused customer avoids products across the divide due to thinking they are incompatible.
