2) But even while identifying 1E AD&D nearly totally with the personality of Gary Gygax, the main people associated with OSRIC either did not understand that just as OSRIC was AD&D restated for the 21st Century, that there would need to be a Gary Gygax-like figure associated with OSRIC, for all the same reasons they themselves love Gary Gygax. There are many reasons, good reasons, why any of them were disinclined to even try to assume such a role, but just as 1E AD&D would likely have been just another game without EGG's continuing post-publishing voice, such is the reality of OSRIC.
It's like an iceberg - you see, and you don't see, the iceberg in the water. When reading Gary's voice in the 1E DMG there's a feeling it stirs up from people who lived those years when all that was new. But there's an illusion there - the text in the DMG is drawing upon years of experiences others coming after don't have. That text can't do for them what it does for us. We don't need another EGG. There can't be another EGG. But anyone who didn't grow up with AD&D needs someone who will be their EGG.
S&W could do that through Matt, although I have no idea if Matt consciously understood that was happening. P&P and other OSRIC folks preferred to point people back to Gary's writing as opposed to taking on a de facto "Gary for a new era" sort of role. I can understand the aversion to that. But anyone who didn't have 20 years in the scene gravitated towards S&W, the game with a face, and that also was both simpler to pick up and run for floaters whose interest was stirred up by Gary's passing, and more flexible in that rules-agnostic creativity space. Matt by himself, in the 2nd go-round, was also more willing to risk open-sourcing S&W text instead of the previous combined OSRIC group's then-consensus preference to minimize the then-unknown legal risk by keeping large sections of it closed. It's just what it is.
But all of these circumstances combine to produce very different trajectories and post-publishing activity outcomes between OSRIC and S&W.
And then there's the ABCDEF
A) You make a name by having something to say, and compelling content to say it around. Before you publish what gets you noticed, you normally have a backlog of old-growth good content built up over time when you weren't running a new enterprise, to draw upon. So there's a spurt of great adventures to fuel momentum. Look at the S&W Matt Finch catalog from 2007 up through a couple of years after the merger with Frog God; look at the first couple of years of AS&SH; Look at LOTFP; Look at Gygax's early output at TSR. Other examples abound. Many of the K&KAers did put out a lot of very good modules for OSRIC in first few years, through XRP. James Boney has several, for example.
B) Not only are you burning through that content much faster than you organically made it when you weren't running an enterprise and spending time on social media publicizing it, the time left to make new content declines even as the demand goes up. The pipeline of content starts looking shallower and shallower, and must be filled somehow.
C) So what do you do? You get new faces who are eager to publish under your banner to keep it going. Hopefully they are all talented. Your name is made, and both you and the new face understand that your name will pull sales that their unknown name won't. In return the unknown becomes known. Think of all the better 2nd gen contributors to games you've bought over a span of time.
D) Eventually you aren't the new thing/hot thing/cool thing. That's likely going to be one someone's previous 2nd gen contributor putting their own spin on the genre under their own name now that it's established. Gavin Norman supported Labyrinth Lord long before he wrote OSE; Jeff Talanian of AS&SH supported late-period Gygax with the aborted Castle Zygyg; etc. The need of each generation's experience to be obviously new-to-them and new-for-them is a dynamic that = gravity for you, and lift for them. Hasbro indulges this cycle through editions, always promising the current one is the last one before breaking that promise for the next generation implicitly demanding a D&D tailored to their own zeitgeist.
E) However...each prior cohort is divided between those who want to renew their association with the current, and those who are entirely satisfied with what was new for them in their time of winner-picking. So long as you established you name at step A, you will likely always have a core of supporters who will turn out for average to good content you now have more time to make that the spotlight and time it consumes have passed to newer hot titles.
