The closer we get to release, the more I worry that their decision to make this a backwards-compatible revision that also has its own entire set of rules changes, subclasses, magic items, monsters, and adventures is going to leave everyone unhappy.

I don’t mind having to make “tough choices” in general, only when the obviously correct choice is boring and the suboptimal one is the cool fun one.

This perfectly sums it up. The problem is that increasing your scores needs to be pretty darn strong, strong enough to compete with a feat…but as you said, it’s usually pretty boring. A couple of +1s certainly add up and make your character more powerful on average, but a feat that grants entirely new functionality just feels so much more impactful and fun.

I would have preferred them to entirely separate stat growth and feat selection, but the OneDnD method of just making most (all?) feats into “half feats” is acceptable as well.

I genuinely hope this results in healthy competition for D&D. That can only result in better content and games for us as players.

A shade tree. By which I mean, a tree that continuously spawns Shades.