Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Now your playing with Playtests!

[kyoryu]

So then is this effectively a replacement for the minion system, with lower level enemies remaining threats in high numbers or as backup to better foes?

Partially - though lower (but not extremely lower) enemies could still be a challenge in moderate groups, where minions usually needed to swarm.

I am sad about the loss of minions - I thought they were one of the better 4e ideas.

Yes, but that doesn't change the argument that it's unlikely that WotC will manage things successfully, or the argument that in either case it doesn't work for skills, because skills as they exist in D&D can only scale by increasing on the D20 roll

I'm not sure this would apply to skills - did the article mention that?

And general distrust of WotC's ability to design games isn't really a topic we can have any kind of interesting discussion about, as it can only degenerate to "yes they can" and "no they can't". If we don't believe they can design a workable game at all, then what type of bad game they write is pretty much irrelevant.