Parmandur
Book-Friend
The trouble with this, and most of the speculation, is that is fun but meaningless.
The sad fact is that 4e was announced in 2007 (GenCon) but was already dead by the time Essentials was released (2010). The two years between the release of Essentials and the announcement of 5e was just running out the clock until the announcement.
In a certain sense, the question is unanswerable; to fans of 4e the untimely death of the produce means that the unreleased products in their mind were AMAZING AND AWESOME in the same way that people speculate about future seasons of Firefly or the unreleased music of Jimi Hendrix; the sad fact is that any product would never measure up to what is in your head.
And, perhaps, it is best that way. I mean- I can still think about how awesome D&D would have been if Gygax never left, forgetting inconvenient facts like, um, Cyborg Commando.
Essentials was an honest attempt to right the ship: 4E wasn't quite down for the count yet, but the previous publishing and marketing scheme crashed and burned for sure.