At first I thought, OK, they’re letting us focus on storytelling—role playing! I too have a romance for the gnarly mechanics (love 2e) but it’s the collapsing of richness in the worlds and characters that dismays me. Now it’s clear we’re marching steadily towards a Marvel superheroization of the experience.
More widely appealing, bite-size, far less varied. Far less interesting. So it goes with mass-market culture. The good news is there are plenty of more interesting artifacts out there…but now we have to do the work of looking for them and sharing them when we found them.