Fantasy Grounds illustrates the worst feature of the current VTT climate: you can't take it with you. That is,there is no way to purchase "the VTT implementation" of a particular book. You have to purchase the SPECIFIC VTT implementation.
That, I think, is the problem.Maps is trying to solve and why I think Maps is going to ultimately aim for the industry standard. They want folks to buy Beyond books knowing they don't have to ever buy them again for another VTT.
If maps allowed the upload of custom tokens I could play anything (Not just D&D) on maps, do not even need the rest of D&DBeyond. Just Maps and Discord.
If I use D&DBeyond character sheets and the encounter builder they provide some automation. One has to manually manage hits, conditions and HP loss but having years of experience with FG I think that full automation can be a trap and there are always cases where it does not apply which are a pain.
The 3D project is a different animal with different goals, aimed at the subset of gamers for whom 3D and even 1st person "TTRPG" play is desirable enough to dump a stupid amount of money into. Those people exist. We know they do. There is some overlap, but they are mostly a different cohort than those that "just want to play D&D online."
I will reiterate because I think it is important: WotC is not going to half-ass Maps given the investment. It is goingvto be somewhere in the Roll20 capability zone, because if you are going to pkay D&D online, they want you to play D&D using Beyond, exclusively.
I fully agree with your last point that they want as many people on D&DBeyond as they can get. Once you have your subscription and buy a book, I am not sure that they care that you use all the bells and whistles that D&DBeyond provides. That is, if you are buying books on Beyond and using their character sheet, I do not think that they will care a lot about whether you are playing on Maps, or Roll20 or whatever.
One thing, I believe that they do not want is that D&DBeyond binds the hands of future developers of the game.
By that, I think that at the moment D&DBeyond needs custom coding to handle the framework of a new class. That is a binding on the game design team. They cannot simply drop in a new class in an upcoming book without coordinating with the Beyond devs.
I think that will change, at the very least if they want to make maps and the 'Beyond tools more attractive to DMs then adding custom classes should be available.
I think Maps will reach an acceptable level just short of the current VTTs but the campaign management, class and subclass and magic customisation will get some attention as will the encounter builder. In fact if you look at it published milestones for the maps utility, when completed it will fall short of Roll20. I think that in the short term the published milestones are what we will get. After that they are likely to deal with the other bottlenecks in 'Beyond that hinder DMs from using their service. Customisation, encounters, and campaign management.
I have used the encounters tool for a face to face one-shot and it is serviceable but I would not like to use it for a whole campaign. It lacks any real way to organise it.
The campaign tools are also as bare as they could possibly be. Even the character sheet could do with a UX review. It is not bad but stuff can be had to find in it and needs better note tasking.
