Make a post on enworld, take the best ideas, make a two year schedule using that stuff and then take a year long break.
Honestly I’d hire two more editors and slow the pace of game development down, if necessary getting them from outside the industry. Real grammar Nazis who begin to froth when they see cut-and-paste errors and care about whether you’ve got commas in front of “which “. And I’d make all books go through them.
I’d also try to get some outside playtesters involved…. Troll the boards, look for smart people with regular games and have them playtest things out in advance.
Heck, I’d charge for it. I’d offer some kind of “premium customer” relationship. Pay wizards x00 bucks to get signed copies of all the wizards books published for a year and a chance to become a playtester for a year and a vote in “the peoples choice” awards where customers could select one book to be developed. Then I’d shamelessly pimp my developers out “I.e. I’m James Wyatt, I really want to write this book about X, because blah blah blah”…
Let people feel like they’re part of the process get them excited, etc.
Generally I’d make an Eberron team (under KB to try to get the books somewhat consistent instead of having people just blasting stuff out of their keyboards with no continuity checking), do the minimum for FR*, and try to develop a few cool ideas a year (ToS type stuff like the book of elements, longer adventure/sourcebooks).
*=Focusing on the things that make the setting unique instead of “here have a big book about Yuan-ti in FR, or about Drow in FR”… the Power of FR book they put out recently is a good example: the setting is famous for having powerful epic characters, so doing a book about a setting like that makes sense.
I might consider some sort of “imprint” project; i.e. have one rules and setting fanboy “redo” the original SJ/DS/Ravenloft set in a book. Instead of re-writing everything they’d go through and condense, skim and crunchify already written material from existing, out-of-print products.
You could wring one good big book out of the existing material without much effort.
(I don’t think Darksun would actually be possible the version in dragon was as good as its going to get with the 3.5 ruleset…)
And I’d lean on my bullpen more… If I redid SJ I’d have Tweet do some kind of ship to ship combat system (with 2 and 3d aspects) and maybe release it as a separate sea based book.
There are a lot of good suggestions for books up above, I like the modified races of the mind (i.e. with giths) a bit but continuing the codex series (with constructs for example) could be interesting. Rules for creating constructs could work very well with settings like Eberron while still having general appeal.
I might consider doing with the yearly “event”. A big themed adventure for example… not sure how well it sold but the epic Spider Queen adventure for FR generated a reasonable amount of buzz when it came out.
