What would a better outcome look like?
Well, if we take as a baseline assumption that the OGL debacle happened, a better outcome would have been for them to reissue the OGL with stronger language making it clear that it was irrevocable, so that people could use it without a sword of Damocles hanging over them. But, of course, they were never going to do that.
A better outcome would have been for them to carry through on their promise to put the older SRDs under the CC license. But even if they were ever sincere in that intention (which I very much doubt), it was never going to survive shifts in corporate priorities, changes in staff, or just business.
And a better outcome would have seen the exec responsible losing his job, and not being allowed to fail upwards. But that's not the American Way, of course.
As I said, what we got was the least-worst outcome from the OGL debacle.
However, what would have been rather better had WotC
not done it at all.
That they even tried to go down this road was borderline unethical, and the way that they did it took them way over the line - between the secret meetings to try to railroad the 'big' players into accepting a slightly-less-toxic version of the deal so that they could then present it as a fait accompli to the rest, and the ludicrous lies about having to do it because of Disney. It would have been better had they not done that.
It would have been better had they not cause
another division in the fanbase, as we watched people lining up to attempt to defend the indefensible.
It would have been better had the various OGL players not had to spend time, energy, and resources that they could ill afford, first in trying to respond to this, and then into making their products OGL-safe so that the existential threat to their businesses was removed.
It would be better if the OGL hadn't been rendered toxic, so that all of the legacy material is now effectively unusable - only a fool would now predicate their business on the use of the OGL, and without that anything opened under it and not elsewhere is now unusable.
It would have been better had we been able to continue thinking of WotC as the disinterested giant, who sometimes stepped on us but only because it couldn't see us, rather than having to think of them as being actively hostile to everyone else in their market, including their own customers.
Anything good that has come in the market since then is
despite the OGL debacle, not because of it. There's no 'win' here.
