The new books will be the proving ground, I wager: if they knock it out of the park, WotC will likely want to capitalize on that in the next couple years.
Sure, though I just don't see who would buy late sequels like that except established fans. I mean, I've book book 19 (literally) by an author before, and it has indeed been great (last Assassin book by Robin Hobb, which is essentially a capstone for the entire setting she has been writing in), but I don't think anyone not already a fan would have got it. Esp. as the books in-between were not as consistent, and some of the DL books in-between aren't merely inconsistent, they're outright bad.
I wouldn't read too much into the judgement of the guy at WotC who tried to kill the novels and subsequently lost his job (replaced by Sdsm Lee recently): he was directly responsible for the War of the Dpark debacle, which yikes, talk about problematic...
Having read about the DL extensively now, my guess would be that he specifically was the guy who sent the email to Hickman/Weis saying "WotC will not be reviewing any more drafts or suggesting any more edits!", which was, from a contractual point of view, basically saying "WotC intends to breach this contract!", and that he sent said email without consulting WotC's legal people. Legal would have told him not to - this is stuff so basic I'm just an ex-legal researcher and I know it, first-year law students could tell you "Don't do it!" (well, second-year maybe but w/e - it's basic contract law). If WotC really didn't want the stuff published they were in a position to keep requesting edits and reviews indefinitely, which would have been tough to challenge legally.
As an aside, whilst looking at this I noted that WotC is
not publishing the DL novels nor seems to benefit much from them.
Penguin is and they and Hickman/Weis seem to get most or all of the profit. So that is an additional angle against DL as a setting for WotC in the short term.
The other point against is that Hickman/Weis attempted to link WotC refusing to review more drafts with "diversity" problems. This strongly suggests the edits they had been asked to make were on the basis of their book being lacking in "diversity" aspects, because otherwise there's literally no reason to say that. And Hickman made the famously idiotic Twitter post re: Modern/Traditional and his strong disapproval of the former in favour of Harry Hamlin and some white '70s hippies. This combo suggests Hickman/Weis would be likely to oppose modernisation of DL, and obviously even if WotC could do it w/o them (which seems like it may be the case), their disapproval of the project would be very bad.
So I think the more I find out about this, the less likely DL as a full setting seems to be. DL being mentioned though is already happening so there's that.
Really, because the only person in the UK I know who is still watching live TV is my dad, and he is seriously pre-boomer!
I literally have no idea who these people are, but the Line of Duty S6 finale (which I loved and am still laughing about, I feel like I should pull that in a D&D campaign sometime) peaked at 13.1m live viewers - that's live - I think that includes live streams, but it doesn't include later streaming because it's specifically at a time period when the episode was airing. So they exist! But yeah same with me, I don't know anyone, not even my parents, who watches live TV. My wife's parents do, but they live in the US.
I make a lot of Jakandor jokes, but if they were launching the setting today, it would be a solid base hit, as opposed to the weird failure that it was in our world. The clash of two cultures, with both of them portrayed sympathetically, fits an era where we've now had tons of prestige TV showing us that sort of complexity and empathy.
I tend to agree. The cultures involved are pretty cool too and I bet you'd get some amazing art out of it today.