I'm in the tech world and I felt up to speed with all the tech and finance bro stuff that they had going on. I found the satire appropriate and timely. The performances were terrific. And I actively hated the experience of watching this movie.

I hated the characters and their callous disregard for human life -- or even the recognition that human lives other than their own were real. Honestly, the real-world equivalents of these people are like this, and I don't want to watch them on my TV.

This is silly. If 4E were actually a super successful D&D edition that was far more liked than other editions, why didn't fans revolt and migrate to 4E-alike games in huge numbers? Paizo became the #2 game in the industry simply because enough people didn't like 4e, yet nothing like that happened with the 4e-5e transition. In fact, D&D has never been more people than it's been under 5e, which is why no one wanted to throw it out for a 6th edition, merely fix some things that could be better.

The central thing many people didn't like about 4e was that it didn't really feel like D&D anymore. D&D has a responsibility to not only be modern, but to appeal to its own fans. 5e was designed to strike a balance there. Having said that, that's not at all the same thing as being as OSR game. Mork Borg, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and such are great, but surely it's obvious that 5e is miles removed from them. The vast growth of the last decade has clearly demonstrated that 5e met both objectives. And there's no demand for it to be thrown out in favor of a sixth edition, which is why the new version is a backward-compatible tune up, not a reinvention.

If 4e truly does include far better game design, someone should release that game and prove it's better by building a huge base. Just don't call it Dungeons & Dragons.

Why don't we wait for the actual Forgotten Realms book to see what Forgotten Realms is like? The only setting detailed in the core books is Greyhawk

In any case, there has always been room for a range of tones in D&D games. The idea that everything needs to be as grimdark as possible is completely misguided.

The way magic items were handled in 4e was one of the worst things imaginable. When they're basically issued to you automatically, there's nothing special or fun about them. That's why they went as far as making them optional in 5e -- to make them special again. Having achieved that, 2024 is moving back to having an economy for them again, which makes sense. And what you get should still depend on the campaign and the world, not on math that assumes they're widely available wherever, whenever.