Lol Wizard of the Coast.
Think people are being a bit hyperbolic. The team size is still bigger than 2014 so they have enough staff to release product.
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I'm guessing they've more or less completed the art for core books 2024 and likely most of the writing.
I don't think people are being hyperbolic.
I think few doubt the 2024 material will come out, and probably be in a reasonable condition (though I doubt as good as it would otherwise have been, given they're still working on it despite an apparently confirmed mid-2024 release).
But after that? The 2014 team was the size it was because D&D was seen as "non-essential" and was being reprieved from execution. Before 4E, Hasbro had decided that if D&D didn't make $50m/year they'd just kill it off, 4E was an attempt to avoid that - one that did not succeed. Hasbro/WotC spared them anyway, probably thanks to a pitch from Mearls and others, that this lower-cost approach to D&D would be worth it. And thanks to cultural factors (and 5E's accessibility, sure), they were proven very right. But that doesn't mean the 2014 team size or a little larger is the "right" size for D&D now, especially not during the release of an effective new edition (I mean, we quibble on the terminology, but it's clearly a big deal - bigger than 3.5E was - and timed like a new edition).
Is it premature to write off D&D? Yeah, it is. It's survived worse, far worse. But that doesn't make what Hasbro are doing remotely a good idea.
The icing on the cake here would be some ill-worded, fake-grovelling apologia from Kyle Brink or worse, someone else who has suddenly replaced him as Executive Producer of D&D (it's happened twice, okay! Let's not pretend that's not how they roll), that somehow manages to deeply insult the community in the name of "addressing concerns". Hopefully they can avoid that.
EDIT - The biggest question for me is, where art thou, 3D VTT. If the 3D VTT isn't losing many people, or even, as recent hiring ads seem to suggest, still gaining them, then we're looking at a genuinely major shift in focus, and part of the reason certain people are being fired from TT D&D is probably because people are being hired for 3D VTT D&D. Ironically that would be less random at least, but more scary for the long-term future of D&D. Perhaps the worst possible scenario would be that the 3D VTT is seen as the future, and it failing causes D&D, as an IP, to get "vaulted" in the way other Hasbro products have been. But the long-range foresight of the OGL and now the CCBY version may continue to save it as a game people play, at least.