Rain has forced me to take a few days off from helping the family put the crop in, and I've spent some time looking at the discussions of this list for the last month. With nothing to do in the tractor but think and turn the tractor every half mile, I've wondered about a variety of topics (mostly No matter what you're stripe, everyone recognizes that Dragonlance has been mismanaged since the original modules and 6 novels came out. Everybody. Now in the past before Dragons of Summer Flame, the mismanagement took the form of beating the dead horse that was the original 14 adventures and flogging it for a good decade. The complaints, least as I can figure, revolved around the fact that there was nothing new for the older fans because the world just wasn't moving forward at all. However, it didn't inspire the bitterness of the 5th Age because you could simply collect your 14 modules have one campaign, and move on, as people invariably did.
So finally DoSF came out, the first book to move forward the world in a decade. The response, mostly was, eh. Certainly it didn't really pique my interest. The plot was rushed (due to trying to do too much in one book) but it also didn't make much sense and was rather poorly constructed. As well, the book pretty much did what Weis and Hickman have become infamous for in other book trilogies (Death's Gate, Darksword etc) which is blowing up a pretty cool campaign setting at the end. ;) Of course in this case, it was supposed to be Dragonlance's swan song. Many recognizable features were stripped from the campaign setting such as the Wizards of High Sorcery and the pantheon.
TSR changed their mind about cancelling Dragonlance, and handed it over to the the 5th Age team. Now their focus was on the SAGA adventure game, which was a rules-light version of D&D with faster play. A rather charming little game that might have made it had they released the game itself as a stand alone product and then simply released the dragonlance products using those rules. My point is that they wanted a D&D-like setting to match their "D&D rules-light" game, something they couldn't do with no magic. So they introduced Sorcery and Mysticism to replace the clerics and mystics.
I don't think that was really the main point of contention that divides the two fan bases. Sure there are complaints about how this type of magic doesn't have the mystery of the old type of magic, but that isn't what inspires hatred.
Why people hate what the Summer of Chaos and the 5th Age did to the setting was due to destruction and lack of variety. This a very important thing that 5th fans will have to address. Silvanathas, Brimstone, Talinthas, Matthew L. Martin, Andre La Roche and the other 5th Age fans have to realize that these were the fundamental flaws in the 5th Age setting. It didn't make it completely suck, but it did make it inedible to the majority of us who sampled it.
First the destruction. Not entirely the 5th Age team's fault, but essentially a lot of the campaign setting's most noticeable (and coolest) features were ripped away. This includes the Maelstrom, Kendermore, The High Clerist's Tower, Palanthas' Tower of High Sorcery etc. Mostly however, was the decision to have yet anoth cataclysm on the heels of the last one. Half of Ansalon was turned to barren wasteland by 5 godlike tarrasques which were out of the control of the DM's and PC's to do anything about. As well, the massive barren lands already had features in the campaign world already. We had a volcanic mountain range and desert around Sanction... we didn't need the desolation. We had a giant swamp in Nordmaar, we didn't need to flood the entire southern coast of the Newsea. We didn't need a new Glacier, we already had half the continet as glacier in Icewall.
This brings us to the second point about the lack of variety. Now I understand what you 5th Age fans are saying. You like the idea of unstoppable evil because it makes the struggle against it that much more heroic. The Eye of Sauron is in the back of everyone's mind as to what a truly epic fantasy story is all about. Fair enough. However, it was simply too much. The 5 dragon overlords (and dozen minor dragonlords) cast such a huge shadow over the campaign that it became the only campaign to play. So if we weren't enthused about fighting the dragon overlords we weren't enthused about the 5th Age.
If Malystryx had killed her rider, settled in Sanction, and practiced a new form of necromancy to devour her dragon enemies and rule a new evil empire she probably would have been considered one of the coolest characters ever. However with 4 other super dragons doing exactly the same thing she wasn't unique. The destruction of the Goodlund Penninsula comes across as utterly pointless. So she becomes despised instead of feared and admired by me, and I presume by many other fans.
As well, if she had been the only dragon overlord, the uber-unstoppable god thing, that would left so much more room for other campaigns to happen in other parts of Ansalon. Flotsam could have been about petty evil, greedy evil, venal evil. Solamnia could be embroiled in civil war as the measure is discarded by one group of well meaning knights, and rigorously defended by another well meaning group... leading the tragedy of the knighthood's best and brightest bleeding to death on the Plains of Vingaard. The Empire of Ergoth could struggle to reclaim its lost glory in a struggle against the monstrous denizens of its ancient capital. None of these campaigns are possible in the 5th Age. The last is still not possible with Gellidus alive (being unkillable).
So yes people new to the boards are going to come on and say how they dislike the 5th Age. I don't think anything really gets helped though by simply dogmatically defending it. I would say yes, the 5th Age has its problems and point out the things about the 5th Age which are good, and which people don't know about because they were overshadowed by the destruction and lack of variety. Point out some of the cool new NPC's. Point out new dungeon sites or creatures such as the Ogre Titans. But the problems have to be acknowledged along with the successes for any meaningful dialogue to take place.
Whether a glacier is in Southern Ergoth as opposed to Icereach, or there's a giant whirlpool in a red sea or not, it still comes down to two things:
1. High Romance
2. Warriors riding Dragons
That's what separates DL from LOTR, FR, Dark Sun, etc., and those elements weren't lost in the 5th Age, and they haven't been lost in the new system either.
Putting an inordinant amount of focus on maintaining the status quo for all the peripheral minutia (keeping all the towers in place, never touching Kendermore, etc.) paves the way for the rehashing upon rehashing we saw from TSR in the early 90's.
EDIT: As for Dragon Highlords, Dark Knights, and Ogre Titans, well, I just happen to think those are freaking cool.