The online chatter around the latest D&D releases and updates make me curious as to what the DMG will look like in November. My suspicion is it will be a better teaching tool than the 2014 DMG, but also not do anywhere near enough to help DMs with the sheer amount of work they have to do to prep and run what seems to be a moderate-to-high complexity game. My concern is it will just point folks at published content and online tools like D&D Beyond as the solution. The "DM as intermediary for WotC" approach.
I think the thing is that like, there will always be a 3rd party market for information work that smooths over rough edges of D&D Design for easier consumption. This used to be located on the forum thread for DM advice, but youtube provided a revenue stream for DM advice that was willing to break down and communicate to people who wanted to run D&D how to go about that. Geek and Sundry's GM tips with Matthew Mercer, Ginny Di, Matthew Colville, and my personal favourite WebDM all produced videos that would serve as piecemeal parts of a "customizable" approach to running D&D.
Frankly, none of these people nor WotC were interested in writing an instruction manual written like a policy handbook. Imagination and Creativity are far more important watchwords.
Now, there is a place where running an adventure is put in a more consistent form, and that's the Module. The Module is a great opportunity for a document that takes all of the heavy lifting from the Game Mrunner (uh) and allows them to play too. I think that with the prominence of D&D's planar worlds in D&D24 there's a lot that's going to have to be explained. Why?
Well, a lot of D&D's approach-ability at the beginning comes it being an assemblage (a collection of tools, but here meaning a collection of symbols) that people are familiar. People generally know what a wizard is, what a knight is, what a goblin or troll or dragon is. It's something they can already imagine and it's not too hard to make that fantastic to boot. Goblins and Trolls and giant rats are low level monsters in 5e so that players can encounter the familiar as they begin to understand the game as it is. When a higher level monster shows up that is weird, it sets a tone (or affect, the word I prefer) because it is foreign. It isn't understood. The players have no context. That shift from the mundane world players understand to the one they do not is the point of like, the dungeon as underworld thing, and also why the dungeon encounter is often derided for being imperialist/colonialist (because it often is either structurally mechanized for violence or simplified into violence for play).
But for a planar adventure, how is that going to shake out? Is the player base developed enough in understanding all of this that the planes are going to be comprehended and the DM guide is delivered to show, "hey here's a suite of elemental or alignment themed monsters that are appropriate for beginning adventures" or are all of these groups going to employ goblins and trolls to cause trouble for players to solve?
Rest assured, whatever it is, youtubers are going to make a career off of picking up the pieces.
WotC and Bethesda can write as big a cheque they want and customers will be so spiteful that it there isn’t money in the bank that they will make the deposits themselves.