Then how can you have read it to say if it were good or bad?
Nobody is required to buy every product WotC puts out just so they can talk about it.
Why, when the hit-point mechanic is already there to do the job?
They do not, and never have, done the job of being meat points. Nor should they.
Anything's possible, I suppose. I guess 2009 was just the watershed moment when they finally got it right huh?
Assuming you mean 2008: Not quite, but closer than any edition before (or since). For one thing, they still referred to regaining hit points as "healing" (and compounded that error by having "healing surges" which had nothing to do with "healing" or "surging" - brilliant mechanic, terrible name).
No edition of D&D, not even 4e, is completely consistent with non-meat point hp. Every edition of D&D is massively more consistant with non-meat than with meat.
We talked about this earlier. If you have a different system for dealing with actual physical damage, this goes away. But yes, if you only have hit points, that becomes a problem.
I mostly agree with Ulorian, but I have to disagree on this. If you are more vulnerable to a particular kind of damage, then you have to work harder and/or be luckier to avoid that kind of damage. Still perfectly consistant with hp as stamina, skill, and luck.
Don't spend your time tearing down WotC
As market leader by a large margin, WotC's actions have an impact on all of us whether or not we play the game/edition they are currently selling. That alone makes them worthy of criticism, and criticising them is not "tearing them down".
It works best if pretty much the only time Vitality and Wounds matter is when you're trying to recover them or get them cured, with Wounds simply taking longer to recover naturally and being harder to cure magically.
IIRC Starfinder has it that its vitality equivalent is easier to recover by resting but
harder to recover with magic. I am not sure how I feel about it (I have only played a couple of sessions of Starfinder so far), but it is at least interesting. And it doesn't do the instant-death-on-a-20 that VP/WP in Star Wars did.