With all the worry about WotC saying D&D is "under-monetized," I thought it might be a good idea to look at this from a positive angle. So, what would you want from a more monetized D&D?
I want to try to answer this while keeping in mind their specific definition of "under-monetized". That term was used in terms of who is buying products and the observation was that most of their sales were to DMs and non-DM players didn't buy much in large numbers. So it's undermonetized in their view in the sense that there's a huge number of
players who aren't buying things.
There are lots of things I would be willing to pay for with my DM hat on - like I'd check out Dungeon and maybe Dragon again (depending on the Dragon content, but I'm always up for adventure anthologies). But as a player it's tougher. In fact all of the things you list are things that I'd potentially buy as a DM, but would be disinterested in as a player. I'd expect as a DM that if I'm paying for a VTT I'd be able to have all of my players on it without them paying an extra charge, for example, or if I'm buying digital books that link into a character creator all of the players in my campaign would be able to use the options from those books for their characters. If I couldn't do those things as a DM I wouldn't pay for those tools.
But thinking with my player hat on, it's tough. I have a few characters I'm playing now and I don't really need that much content for them - I've got the PHB and I've got Tasha's and that's kind of sufficient for what I want? I can really see why TSR and Wizards have all had a problem getting
players to buy books in large quantities when I'm on this side of the table - there's just not a lot to offer. And even if they gave me books full of player options, I wouldn't use many of them for any given campaign. A single book of options might last me for a dozen characters (which, with how often I get to play rather than DM, would probably mean more than a dozen years worth of content).
So with my player hat on - a personalized mini would be nice. Like if I could get them to create personalized minis for my characters that I could use digitally and/or have 3d printed and sent to me. But it would have to be reasonably priced. (I know these services exist, but so do VTTs and Wizards is trying to monetize that).
If I were playing in a specific campaign world published by Wizards I might want more player-facing info about the setting to be easily accessible without buying full books (but that may be my DM hat talking - most of my players actually barely read the bullet point onepager I give them on a setting). But I'm actually not - both of the characters I'm playing are in homebrew worlds, so that wouldn't really be on my radar unless I got into a game in a published setting.
I mean it's tough. It's a game that is designed to be played with a handful of dice, some paper, and maybe one mini per player that isn't the DM. I can absolutely see why digital microtransactions and a 3d VTT would be the kind of thing they'd hit on for players. There are probably players out there who would pay for different clothing options for their personalized digital minis, or pay for specific animated effects for their characters spellcasting or attack moves, or specialized digital dice, or other cosmetic things like that. It's just not a game that lends itself to players spending a lot of money on it (in fact I'd argue that ends up being on of the strengths of RPGs in general - they're fairly cheap for everyone but the DM, and honestly the DM only needs to spend as much money as they feel like spending).
