I'm not exactly the most well-regarded, loudest or even most-authoritative poster here on the subject, though I figure by now a lot of folks would consider me the most acerbic about the two, but even I am not really one to celebrate when someone loses their primary source of income even if they had it coming. Considering Holden's history of holding both his potential audience (to the point of being curtailed from a mod-position at a fairly high-traffic forum for being unduly abrasive) and his employers in open contempt, and hatewheel's stunning inability to avoid putting his foot in his mouth despite being a Writer who arguably should understand how words carry meaning for the contexts you present them, hopefully the two of them can find easy employment in another industry that doesn't provide quite so much rope to hang themselves with, and for the love of god not place them on a customer-facing position.
That said, while it leaves open a great deal of room for improvement on Ex3, a lot of the damage has already been done. The corebook is out in the wild, and much like 1e before it, its obvious that the line can only survive by moving forwards, not iterate out the myriad problems established by the base text. Which means that even if the next book is the Best Book, and funded accordingly, it will merely be another example of Exalted's lingering and questionable pedigree of massive swings in quality for the investment of time and effort to play. We saw this repeatedly in the early 00s, as Solars and the core-assumptions they were built upon languished in pending-errata hell for the next half-decade or so once every other Exalt-type got their own turn, paving the way for several official and unofficial rewrites (like Power Combat and Cult of the Illuminated Solars).
With almost twice as many Exalts promised than before, this looks to be asking a Lot of players who were not immediately taken by the idea of using their unused collections of books to fill the competency-gaps left behind by the text, or demanding the new audience seek out system-incompatible PDFs of out-of-print books for setting material as the new versions take a stab at trying to fashion the updated system into something genuinely Inviting for the extended Kickstarter-mainstream, who might otherwise feel burnt or turned away by all the soured goodwill surrounding the subject til now. The fact the DB book is having such a tepid response despite being what Should have been a grandslam in terms of game-importance and fan-interest, doesn't really strike me as very heartening.
So yeah. While the mutiny is a success, I don't think there's a whole lot of folks who can deny that Holden and co still sent them all out to die on a leaky boat, regardless of how well they can navigate the reefs.
