Oh, I'm not arguing about placeholder names. This whole issue is placeholder names escaping into the wild.

To me personally though, "2024" felt like the last gasp of Hasbro trying to sell an infinitely-rolling, "DnD-as-a-service" dynamic. Fans broadly understand editions and expect them to come with a serious scope of updates, but "annuals" could be deliberately confusing and ephemeral. The hope was they'd seem "new and shiny" enough to still prompt fans to buy them.

Or maybe that's just over-conspiratorial thinking. I dunno.