From a recent Robert J. Kuntz interview:
My advice in any case: Evolve or Die. Once you slide into mediocre or templated design it is very hard to crawl out of it and specifically because it has a very low entry bar. So, pay no attention to people who say, “I can do that too,” as do a thousand or more others, but do extoll and encourage those who break the mould and create their own models by separating themselves from the pack.
The paths in design are either form or formula. Choose wisely, because we are currently mired with a very large percentage of formulaic designs. In fact, I believe that board game designers, who work within a much more constrained realm of abstraction compared to RPG designers, are currently making more headway than the latter. Since the fantastic is a contingently infinite realm of possibilities, then the above realization, IMO, becomes a flashing red light. IOW and IMO, the current crop of RPG designers are not, on the main, leveraging the unknown (FORM) but are recycling the known (FORMULA).
As Orson Scott Card once noted: “How can we create the literature of the strange if we stay in well-mapped lands?”
Most of the interview is about the rewriting of the history of D&D to put the founders in a very very bad light. It is worth your time to read.