Quote Originally Posted by NigelWalmsley View Post
Well, sure, but I think that's largely vacuous. Anything is going to alienate some people and attract others. Unless you're willing to argue that 3e was at some kind of maxima, I don't think it means very much that changes might piss some people off. Pf had the opportunity to do robust, goal-driven playtesting and design and did not do that. It's not even that they didn't have the exact goals I wanted, it's that they did not have coherent and measurable goals to any meaningful degree.
I mean, I personally believe they did, but that their goals were so alien and distant to what we as a community wanted that it just seems to us like they didn't. Paizo designed a system that allowed them to publish as many adventure paths as they wanted and to make it incredibly simple for DMs to operate said adventure paths, in an attempt to scoop up as much of a market share in the beer and pretzels casual tabletop rpg community as they could.