I have mixed feelings about "no more half [whatever]."

My *opinion* is; rules differences for ancestries *are* mostly good (because they're different species, not humans with indistinguishable physical and intellectual capacities), *but* it can shade into racism. Ie; I can see "an elf" being naturally faster and more agile than a similar human (different species) but I can't see cultural differences between hunter-gatherer wild elf and bookish gray elf playing out in biological differences in strength.

I definitely feel "intelligence" (and to a lesser extent "wisdom" and "charisma") are loaded terms where stat modifiers should *always* be off limits. That gets uncomfortably close to justification for real world exploitation and genocide. Moving along...

Like it or not, D&D comes from a somewhat racist context (for instance Robert E Howard's fiction, where Aquilonians are innately different from the Picts they're trying to conquer), and half-elves/half-orcs are an inclusion from where Tolkien, who was fairly good about this stuff, was racist. "Half elves are not just culturally but biologically different from elf or human" teeters on the edge of profoundly offensive. Theoretically you could take hybrids out of the game and I'd be cool with that, but... I'm not.

Given that I'm from groups where being recently made invisible by pigeonholing us as "white" is the latest step in genociding us, I'm really uncomfortable with "disappearing" mixed ancestry adventurers!

Unfortunately I feel like reductionism here - and you need reductionism to jam reality into something you can quickly play as a game - is a real problem (when you simplify armor into "AC," it doesn't touch on anyone's bitter family history) and I don't have an easy answer.