Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
Charlaquin answered this with a more eloquent question than I would have.
I think usually there's a third option that isn't being considered – the old equality/equity/justice parable about the ball game and the box to see over the picket fence etc.
You'd need to do something if you want to help both groups feel included, and thus sell the game too both groups. For example: I have friends who refuse to play 5e let alone 4e Essentials because they dialed back away from the elegant balance of 2008 4e's AEDU power system for all characters, and they feel the game now is rigged back in favour of quadratic wizards and linear fighters. I don't agree with them, even though I vastly preferred 4e over 3.5e, as I prefer 5e over both systems, but our subjective experience with these systems have led me to buy 5e books and them not to. Their gameplay style doesn't feel included by the system.
That's okay – not all systems are going to be inclusive of every gameplay style. But they have a system that's relatively well-built to play with, and both Pathfinder 2E and 13th Age are relatively successful systems that build off of the gameplay style of 4E. But now if they were told "your way of playing is wrong and you are wrong to like it" and were bullied out of playing any successful, well-stocked RPG, or if 5e D&D was the ONLY RPG allowed to be published bc WotC aggressively pursued a copyright against anyone making an T&T RPG? That would be a problem.
This may be a problem for WotC if they want to include my friends, and maybe if enough players were like my friends, 6E would be a more dial-based system where you could make it more like 4e or more like 3.5e or more like 5E etc. Or maybe WotC by publishing updated OGLs and SRDs, will start supporting multiple editions at the same time more effectively to hopefully win my friends back as customers.
But my friends' preferences are not the same as say, a black kid opening the PHB and seeing only white characters in art of the book and thus feeling like the game doesn't belong to them. 5e has by and large strived to be big tent when it comes to people and their identities and to not reduce us down or cater to just one group of people when playing. But that's not perfect either, and some folks feel like they're losing THEIR game as it becomes more inclusive. Dark Sun and Ravenloft are great example of the complications here – both feature pretty culturally problematic ideas due to their lineage in pulp fiction works that had used those tropes. But you remove too much of them and it doesn't feel like the setting anymore. 5E D&D found a way to make Ravenloft work more or less while trying to clean it up of anti-Romani stereotypes, but even the 4E take on Dark Sun engaged in discussions taht 5E's makers want to stay far away from. So I'm not sure how we get a return to Dark Sun that stays true to what makes the setting itself while also being inclusive.
It's not perfect. It's not easy stuff, and the creators of the game are also only human and are bound to make mistakes, too.
