To me, the initial posting sounds like being written by someone who wants to bring the masses odff D2 fans / buyers to bear.
I mean, if such a mass of people is thinking - and the industry supports them - "H/S is the optimal solution" ... well, then every small developer who doesn't want that should become frightened, and this is how it sounds to me.
These H/S lovers are definitively the ones who have grown up with the mind pattern RPG = H/S . They don't know classics like Ultima, as it seems to me.
As El'Gammon (aka elgi) once wrote, it's this way : The whole RPG genre has been pushed through a narrow canal that was D2, leaving everything else behind. What I mean is in German something like that the whole RPG ganre had to go through the "Nadelöhr" that was defined by Blizzard. Everything else was chopped off - decisions of the publishers which were smelling gold because of the huge masses of followers of the Action-RPG sub-genre - and in the result the whole RPG genre was re-defined. No more virtues, no more humility, no more tales of bards, only H/S.
And what's even more, Monsters are used especially in H/S games as an excuse for collecting eperience points. I don't like that. I want interaction.
Companies relying completely on H/S won't see my money, and even now I'm drifting back to Adventures.
