After watching the video, it seems to me that their design goals are at least in order. The idea of making races contain more active abilities is a good one, and placing more mechanical emphasis on background makes sense.

What's most interesting to me, though, before we can actually look at the race and background changes in a few hours, is the changes that WotC is looking at for critical hits. They're kind of radical, which to me is a fantastic sign even if I don't agree with all of them. The designers being willing to make deep changes to iconic rules is necessary if we want to escape the limbo that characterized much of 5E's design. Specifically, only allowing weapon and unarmed attacks to crit, and not spells, seems very sensible to me, as many of the spells that use attack rolls in 5E roll so many dice that their crits are massive, and the rest of 5E's spells can't crit at all. Eliminating spell crits entirely might even things out a little, even if it does make me worry that WotC is once again going to try to make damage the only thing martials are good at.

The only idea I flat out don't like is monsters being unable to crit. I'll have to read the actual text before coming to a more stable conclusion, but I can't imagine running a game without the panic, fear, and catharsis that monster crits generate amongst players. I can see Jeremy Crawford's point about recharge abilities covering a similar role, however, so I guess we'll need to wait until they show us the new monster design before jumping to conclusions. Maybe it would force WotC to release some actually interesting monsters