I'm wondering if the mainstream audience will pick up on it and how they'll respond if this really is the case. Pretty much every bit of advice I can recall making it into official books regarding child characters can be summed up as "don't" because their presence completely dominates the tone of every scene they're involved in across the entire game, from combat to social interaction and, yeah, the stereotypical horny bards.
Could Wizards just coast through the negative attention again? If it's got new edition hype behind it maybe, but relying on reputation like that works until it very suddenly doesn't. Don't want to end up in a situation like White Wolf or Blizzard where the audience are already primed and expecting to react negatively no matter what you do.
An example that sticks in my mind on how big the hair-trigger can be surrounding these things would be Radiance House's Grimoire of Lost Souls - the Pact magic conversion for 3pp Pathfinder 1e. It had a more developed subsystem for tracking and manipulating a character's age via magic, from very young to very old, as well as a separate ritual that was fluffed as involving the participants magically simulating sex. People condemned the book on launch because if you combine these two things and squint you would have underage sex in your game, and to this day whenever it's mentioned you have good odds on someone chiming in about how they don't allow it because "it's all gross fetish bait".
." Plus it does leave the door open for all sorts of coombrained house rules.
