2. Discouraging people from playing humans. I'm sure I recall Sven saying it's disappointing for them to see so many people playing humans when they put so much effort into the other races.
This is an unfortunately common bit of misinformation that just won't seem to die. They thought it surprising and amusing, having spent all that time developing weird and wonderful races and appearance options for a fantasy setting, that when they tried to see what options people were picking the average was just a bloke that wouldn't have looked out of place walking down the street in any majority-white place here on Earth. I thought it was kind of funny too, but I bet they wish they'd never made that joke now! Which isn't to say that they wouldn't be keen for folk to experiment with everything the game has to offer, but it seems a huge leap to think they'd sabotage humans to push that.
Interesting. I had no idea, it really was only something I vaguely remember hearing or reading long ago, so in light of what you wrote I take it back.
You can't do variant human with that setup, ...
I'd just add to this that the Tasha ruling states:
"The variant human presented in the Player’s Handbook is the default example of the human race while using this house rule." So getting VH with their usual +1/+1 would supposedly fit with the +2/+1 to anything ruling.
