How is This Still a Product?

Wizards of the Coast have just announced that on the 20th of June they're going to release official character sheets for 5th Edition.

This makes me want to throw things. Official character sheets are one of those products that should have ceased to exist years ago - if you have access to the internet and a printer, you have no need of this product, and should have no desire to be ripped off by it. And if you don't have access to either the internet or a printer, then frankly you have bigger problems than needing a printed sheet for your D&D character.

It's not even as if WotC are particularly adept at producing character sheets - the current official sheet (from the PHB or their website) is barely adequate, and it's not significantly worse than most of their previous efforts. I guess 2nd Edition might have had decent official sheets... but then, that was TSR, not WotC (and, honestly, I doubt it anyway).

Nor can these official sheets be meaningfully considered 'more convenient' than downloading and printing a set at home. To get the official sheets you either have to go to the store to get them, inevitably taking time, or you have to wait for them to be delivered. Whereas 'download and print' takes a few minutes at most, and then you have the sheets in-hand. And even that's assuming you just print out the sheet, rather than using some sort of fillable form... or even better, using an electronic form on a phone or tablet. That is, it's inferior not only to modern technology, not even to last decade's technology, but to technology available at the end of last century. (Amazon started in 1994.)

Seriously, official pre-printed character sheets are probably the single worst standard product any RPG producer might offer. Only official dice match them in the "bad product" stakes - and, again, because those tend to be a bog-standard set of the seven polyhedrals with nothing special about them at all, and which aren't even provided in mixed colours to make them easy to tell apart. You're paying a premium for the brand-logo on the box, and nothing else; you can get a better set of similar dice for less money from the exact same vendors who supply your 'official' dice.

(Official dice that are in some way customised are somewhat exempt from this particular sub-rant... but only somewhat. Because sticking an image on Cthulhu on a set of dice does add at least a quantum of interest to the set, which might just be worth spending money on if you have plenty to spare. A standard set of polyhedrals with a 20% markup for having the D&D logo on the box, not so much.)