All other considerations aside, unless WotC either produces the GSL for perusal by interested and NDA'ed parties soon or else shifts the dates around, the value of being an early adopter does indeed diminish considerably, certainly enough to make ponying up $5K a far less reasonable business decision than it would have been a few weeks ago.

It'll be very interesting to see how things unfold.

Yes, as a designer I'm mostly curious. I would be pretty happy working through 3E to a deeper degree, or trading off between 4E experimentation and the comfort and familiarity of 3E for a while.

As a publisher I'm a little more frustrated, because I have to make decisions about articles from freelancers quite a bit in advance. It's tough to accept or reject queries when I'm working in a knowledge vacuum. How will the 4E be received? Heroes or zeros? The lack of data is frustrating.

I wind up usually saying "Well, I guess WotC is fine with me supporting 3E for a while, because they're giving me no reason to move to 4E support."

I'm with krell1 on this. I'm hoping to find several publishers who are interested in supporting and writing new 3.5 material.

4.0 will be mostly something I imagine I will merely dabble in at cons.

As the weeks and now months roll by, the answer seems to be "A very small, short 4E product". :)

If you have suggestions, I'm all ears.

That's a good idea. This time around thought Necromancer Games and Goodman Games (makers of the DCCs) have announced plans for such. Necro's free intro adventure saw over 10,000 downloads its first few years.

Actually, Necromancer is already doing that as well with their Advanced Players Guide.

In fact, funny situation there. I believe it's basically entirely written but Clark Peterson can't look at it until WotC sorts out the licensing. (The freelancers he used are WotC freelancers who already have access to the 4e rules, but he does not. So he has a finished manuscript that he can't even see!)

I guess the employess are all nice people and love the game (and maybe even use 3rd party products themselves).

They are nice people and most of them do play and use 3rd party material.

Rest assured that WotC is not an evil scheming empire. It is a business however, and at the top are the shot-callers --- this is where the fun stops.

Just FYI, I doubt it's #2. They stated that the rules they would provide early to Phase 1 publishers would be incomplete and would in fact change (and be updated twice if I recall correctly).

I seriously doubt #3 & 5, since it's not as huge issue for WotC if the Phase 1 publishers have to hurry their products' development. The fee is pretty much a bar to keep the masses of smaller companies out for a bit until 4e has some time to sink in enough for distributors and stores to be comfortable with it.

As for #4, I don't see them necessarily pulling it. I can easily see things being so delayed that no one finds it worth it, and there are no Phase 1 publishers. WotC is more likely to force that onto the other publishers to opt out until January than to decide to pull it altogether (either by making everyone wait until January - which looks really bad to consumers, or letting everyone in early - which could bring a glut which looks bad to distributors).

I'm near certain it's some version of #1 - although more of the "it's a very high priority for 3rd party publishers, but not nearly as high for Hasbro lawyers". I'm sure the Hasbro legal department is paid well enough to not be clueless. It's just their priorities don't match the other publishers, and it's a busy, busy world. :)