you've spoken at length about problems with D&D5e re: the disconnect between the game hasbro says that it is vs the game that it actually is, and have made it clear that such discussions aren't about the weaknesses of D&D5e itself as a game. I do suspect that you have some thoughts on that though, and I'd be interested to hear them. there are plenty of thinkpieces from others already, but I'd like to hear yours specifically, if you're interested.
A big part of the reason I don't talk a lot about Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition as a system is because it's been my experience that, as indie RPG designers, there's a constant temptation to treat a game's culture of play as something which emerges purely from its published text. It'd be super convenient if that were the case: if the ultimate source of the problem is bad game design, then it can be fixed with better game design. In practice, this framing leads people to prattle on about how playing trad RPGs causes brain damage while overlooking the rather more obvious economic incentives for why D&D's culture of play is the way it is.
All that in mind, I tend to look at it the other way 'round: the main problems with D&D5E as a system stem from a shared set of circumstances with its culture of play. Hasbro wants to market 5E as a universal entry-level game, and to that end, they've given Wizards of the Coast a mandate to produce an "evergreen" D&D which appeals equally to fans of all past iterations of the game. This goal is of course both impossible and absurd, and the result is a game whose rules are put together based mostly on vibes, with greater weight given to whether any particular feature is deemed to reinforce D&D's brand identity than to how it actually operates in play, or to how it interacts with other features that have been included in the same fashion.
In the most extreme cases, this leads to a text which pretends to have features it does not in fact possess. For example, 5E wants to have the vibe of a game which cares deeply about logistical play, in order to attract players who like that sort of thing; however, it's also terrified of imposing entry barriers that might interfere with maximising the number of people playing D&D, so you end up with stuff like lengthy stats tables of functionally identical weapons, an economy that denominates prices of adventuring supplies to the hundredth of a gold piece and stops being relevant by level three if you're running the gameplay loop as written, and subsystems for carrying capacity and consumable resource tracking which ask you to do a lot of math for a mechanical impact so insubstantial that it doesn't materially affect said gameplay loop at all if you simply leave it out entirely.
Basically, it's a text that puts forth tremendous effort to obfuscate its own baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played, because it might hypothetically alienate someone who would otherwise have given Hasbro money if it ever expressed an opinion. I've talked in the past about how a lot of RPGs don't seem to understand how to engage in transparency about their own design goals, but Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is one of the very few games I've encountered that demonstrates it perfectly understands how to engage in design goal transparency by consciously doing the exact opposite.
I think some of this could be alleviated, or at least lessened, by making some pre-written 5e adventures as a set that tilt heavily on each of their "pillars". I personally don't find most first-party adventures interesting at all, because they all seem to be so averse to setting a proper mood and tone and having the mechanics support that. Meanwhile, I would kill for a prewritten adventure module that starts the party traveling on and then crawling out of an airship that crashed in the mountains with the goal of traveling the days or weeks it takes to get to the nearest town, as a survival-, logistics-focused story with high grit and numeric crunch. I would love to have a proper Tomb of Annihilation that is purely dungeon-delving, combat-strategy wargaming with paranoia-inducing traps and riddles. I would adore a campaign that's all about the politicking and scheming of a minor noble house trying to rise to the level of relevance in an established kingdom, managing allies and scheming against enemies. Because the game has all of these mechanics and options if you want them, but I have never in a million years felt any compunction to engage with selling a pallet of cheese, looking at what type of damage a weapon deals piercing damage, or debated whether to buy a magnifying glass, and I feel like a lot of that indifference comes from the way the 2014 PHB, the DMG, and Lost Mines let so many of these options trail off into nothing. You're never given a reason to care about those tables, and instead of including them and hoping people are tricked into buying the game based on their appearance, it'd be so cool to be able to run something without years of planning that demonstrates by doing instead of telling when these mechanics are relevant and helpful.
