Yes, it is a business. But unlike all other businesses, this one has decided that the feedback of its customers (or as Tevas put very properly - investors) doesn't matter. The company takes a stand on something, and 98% of a core group of its customers (and I'm going with each class equals a core), after testing out the results of that stand, come back and say "this was a terrible idea, you totally shouldn't do it", and then the company proceeds to NOT ONLY approve what everyone is complaining about, but to go further on making it bad even worse.
We, the ownership, have typically stayed away from interacting directly with these forums
Why? Your player base has a huge presence on the forums, and I don't mean just your chapter, but all others as well. You're designing rules that effect all the locations, not just your own, and by staying away and not interacting with the players you are simply ignoring them. That results in things like either players not having faith in the owners to do a good job, or players just not giving a damn about what happens because they're talking to the void.
Relics – This proposal was one of my ideas, and I am saddened to see that so many of you do not feel that they live up to your expectations.
I liked the idea behind it, I just think (as others have pointed out) that it could be better. A minute in combat is a huge amount of time. Yes, as you pointed out, that already exists for refitting armor, but that doesn't diminish the negative value of that time amount. A fighter knows that he's going to loose that time fixing his armor (or 30 sec if he's lucky to be a master smith/have one available), and I know plenty that just don't reset during the fight, because loosing that 60 seconds is just too detrimental. Now the healer is loosing 60 seconds on a use of a skill that's frankly got everyone going "meh"
Paragon Paths – I know this isn't in the play test packet any longer, but this was also my brain child.
Personally, I loved the idea of Paragon Paths. Yeah, they needed balancing, but that doesn't mean they should have been taken out. And everyone else can go ahead and bitch about that, this was something that's badly needed and needs to be fixed and implemented.
Mettle – I am actually surprised that folks think this isn't strong enough. Do not forget that in the wording of the ability it allows the player to spend a second use of Mettle to drop that count down to three seconds. 10 seconds (or three seconds) to get a resist to pretty much any status effect seemed super great to me.
I said it earlier. I like the idea of Mettle. For me personally, it falls a bit flat due to the 10 sec timing and feeling like its only useful with a double-use. That right away makes me think "good idea, bad design." As Tevas pointed out, 5 second loss of action due to Disarm is already a thing, making it a 5 second loss to match Disarm is a more polished design.
Multiple Rollouts – It has come up in this forum before that we should roll out the magic item changes and then roll out the other rules changes after we have seen how the MI changes work. To be particularly blunt: this is not going to happen.
This right here is my biggest issue with the entire testing process. This didn't start out with the idea of "lets build a new rules system." If it did, then by all means, keep plugging away. But if the intent was "we have these problems, lets figure out a way to fix them" then multiple roll-outs is absolutely the best approach to, not only fix the issues that you originally intended, but also not to completely throw the entire system out of order by allowing conflicting and sometimes completely unnecessary changes.