I'm -- putting it generously, because there's still line developers and editors and the like -- nominally "in charge" of individual products that I pitch and write (like Elven Blood, Neat, Way of the Adept, Land of Promise, and other solo-author stuff), at most. And I'm "in charge" of my chapters in shared products, or my fiction contributions to the same (stuff like Attitude, Spy Games, Street Legends, Storm Front, where I wrote chunks). But we're all just contractors, dude. We pitch an idea, someone else likes it, and we get paid to write it (and then someone else edits it, proofs it, etc, and hopefully it all falls into place). Aside from that, we all take part in the behind-the-scenes brainstorming and knife-fighting over ideas, themes, and metaplots, and try to get our voices heard (same as everyone else does). For instance, there's stuff about SR5 I'm terribly proud of (despite not being the one contracted to write it, because I argued for it and folks bought my logic and made changes), there's stuff about SR5 I'm not crazy about (despite me arguing for it, but other arguments winning out and other ideas making sense to TPTB). It's all part of a process with lots of people providing input and ideas, not anything that you can point to one of us and say "this dude totally did all of X."
As far as any distancing ourselves is going on? It doesn't come from any sort of dislike of "the Old Guard" (Patrick and Bull are "Old Guard" themselves, for instance), most of it that I can think of comes from trying to tone down the overt transhumanism that was cropping up in many corners of inherited SR4, and much of it comes from those brainstorming sessions (and, believe it or not, not from Jason twirling his mustachios like a serial villain and plotting retcons from his secret lair beneath a volcano). The tech level was moving in some directions many of us weren't crazy about, the focus of the setting was shifting into places that many of us didn't want it to go, some folks had some metaplot ideas, or what-have-you, so we sat down and hammered out ways to try and move things in new directions.
I...okay, here. I'll use my recent shake-ups in the Tir as an example, since it's the, well, example I'm the most personally familiar with (and so that I'm not speaking for anyone else, or putting words in anyone's mouth). I don't know what "the Old Guard" had planned for the Tir. Read over Sixth World Almanac, and the couple of lines in System Failure, and reconcile them with Shadows of North America and the old Tir Tairngire sourcebook, and slap on a layer of Jet Set and Twilight Horizon, with a pinch of Runner Havens for flavor. Take all that, and look at it about a year ago real-time, and tell me (a) what was going on in the Tir, (b) what the writers meant to be going on in the Tir. You can't. There isn't enough information there to make a cohesive setting, and "the writers" are scattered across three generations of Shadowrun creation, some of them are dead, some of them aren't writing any more. We don't know where the old IEs are scattered off to, we don't know how much (or how little) they're still influencing the Tir, we don't know what Princes are still in power (except for two), we don't know what the country's like (except for how Horizon is spinning it, and how Horizon spun it in the past)...so sitting down, rolling up my sleeves, and trying to make my favorite corner of the Sixth World playable again, I couldn't do anything but "distance" the setting from the "Old Guard," y'know? I didn't have their notes, I couldn't read their minds, I didn't have any way to know what plans any of them had (if they even had any). I had to look at what was written in canon, and I had to work with that -- their writing, not their intent -- and try to make things work again. I didn't retcon anything, I didn't undo anything, but I clarified what I could, I introduced a whole new slew of Princes so folks could tell their political stories, I tried to find the sweet spot between the original TT's awesome flavor but Magical ElfyLand That's Better Than You, The Rinelle Are Blowing Shit Up For Very Good Reasons But We Don't Know All Of Them, and the more recent corporate-backed blandness but tourist-friendly veneer. It all had to happen. It all had to be there. It all had to make sense...but the end result, I felt, if anything, had to be closer to the original awesomesauce of the TT sourcebook, which was the oldest source material we had (yes), but also the most in-depth and awesome. And then folks got Land of Promise, the end result of me trying to make sense of all of that, get the information and fallout into one place, and make it a cool setting for shadowruns again.
Maybe Nigel's spinning in his grave, I don't know. Maybe Tzeentch and the other SR3 Tir guys love it, or hate it, or haven't been bothered to read it, I don't know. I haven't even heard much from the other SR4 guys who wrote a few of those books that had info in them. I know what reviewers have told me and fans have told me, not what the Old Guard, the New Guard, or the Imperial Guard have said. I don't know what the Old Guard had planned, I know what my pitch was, and my project spec was, and I went to work and did the best I could to hammer things into shape and make it a country folks could play the game in again.
The same holds true for the follow-up politics in Storm Front (which I'm too much of a canon whore to put into Dirty Tricks, because we have the canon Tir election schedule and DT was being published too early to fit in the timeline, so I put it off until SF), and for the adventures set in the Tir in Elven Blood, and for me bringing Dodger back into the spotlight a bit, and for the gangs I've written about in my adventures, the criminal syndicates and locations I crib from Seattle sourcebooks to use in Neat, the espionage hotspots and organizations I wrote about in Spy Games, and on and on and on. We look at what's there in canon, we try to figure out what would be awesome to have happen next, and we write it. Sometimes that means a radical evolution of momentum we already saw, sometimes that means hitting the brakes on a metaplot a little bit, sometimes it means a crazy left turn, sometimes it just means a casual name-drop to add some flavor.
And -- believe it or not -- that's what we're all out to do. We don't have secret transcripts of Jordan Weisman and Nigel Findley planning things out decades in advance. We don't have a master plan left to us by the primogeniture, guiding the metaplot into the 2090s. We have a love of the game, a desire to keep writing, a hunger to let fans enjoy our work or play our adventures, and enough free time and masochism to waste our time doing this. We're not purposefully distancing ourselves from the Old Guard, because we don't know what the hell the Old Guard wanted.
You do not really expect that your beloved writers will say something openly against JH?
SYL
SYL
All snark aside, how many employees do you know who'll post on forums dedicated to their products, and cheerfully jump into a dogpile about their boss? And how many of them do you think would do so while planning to keep their jobs? In any industry, speaking about any employer, how many rational adults do you expect to post "herp derp my boss is an idiot and I hate him, LOLOLOLOL," really?
There's a difference between being critical of a process, and insulting your boss. You guys can expect some of us to do the former -- and we have, because trust me no one hates editorial mistakes more than the writers who have their name attached to a product -- but demanding we do the latter for your amusement, and acting like some precious point is being made if we refuse, is as inane as it is immature.