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Because, Heroes of the Feywild is a PoL/Nentir Vale Core Setting Supplement.  In the Core Setting, Gnolls are specifically abyssal hyena people.  Maybe in another setting they might not be tied to demons, but be primal hyena folk that live with the faeries, but not in the core setting, so they can't be that in Heroes of the Feywild.

However, yesterday's Ability Scores for Everyone update gave me reason to believe Gnomes will be featured in the book as one of the three or so races.  My reasoning here is that they got their versatile ability score bonuses, but were not featured as one of the "remaining six races" that needed to be updated.  However, neither were Gnoll nor Revenant.  Gnoll was completely ignored by the article, but Revenant got it's versatile score; it just didn't get a few paragraphs like the others.  So, Gnomes and Revenants got included, but without mention, and the article specifically refers to "the remaining six races," when the article actually updates the remaining eight.  Revenants appear in Heroes of Shadow, so logically Gnomes would appear in Heroes of the Feywild.

This is, of course, unless it was an oversight, and they update the article in the middle of April with a paragraph for Gnomes, Revenants, and Gnolls, and add Gnoll stats in.  But unless they do that, I'm hedging my bets on Gnomes being one of the races featured in our Book o' Faeries.

Mar 15, 2011 -- 6:02PM, Fedosu wrote:

So you're saying that just because they haven't mentioned something so far, means it cannot possibly be the case? I will point out that both minotaurs and gnolls are specifically called out as demon-worshippers in MM1. "Gnolls are feral, demon-worshipping marauders that kill, pillage, and destroy." "Minotaurs are fierce, bull-headed monsters that worships demons and enslave and plunder weaker creatures." Those are the first sentences of their pages in that book. Minotaurs are later described as sometimes being good, or at least turning away from Baphomet, so is is really impossible to imagine that they might describe a group of gnolls who turned away from Yeenoghu and maybe fell under the sway of an
Arch-Fey?

Ammendments to and expansions on existing material is part of D&D, saying that gnolls are and only can be demon-worshippers because the books so far haven't thus far described them otherwise is silly, short-sighted, and frankly inimaginative.

Minotaurs were also described in the MM1 as having unaligned, non-bloodthirsty societies.  It was a design goal from the beginning to make a more Tauren-like primal group of Minotaurs; not so for Gnolls.

Mar 15, 2011 -- 9:08PM, Fedosu wrote:

And yet, oddly, we got Gnolls as a player race (in Dragon 367) before we got Minotaurs (Dragon 369). This suggests to me that the designers (at least at that time) saw Gnolls as just a valid option to be something other than blood-thirsty demon-worshippers as they did Minotaurs. The only difference is that Minotaur societies are specifically called out as sometimes being okay in the text of the MM1.

But then there are other things that have changed since the beginning. Elves didn't have an Int bonus back then, and that race was mostly flavoured as being the nature loving kind of elf, while Eladrin were the magical high elves; now things have changed, and elves have some of that arcane high elf flavour back. Does the fact that arcane flavoured Elves weren't mentioned in the PHB1 (and in fact that flavour was explicitly given to the Eladrin "They prefer the primal power of the natural world to arcane magic their eladrin cousins employ) means that giving elves the Int bonus was somehow not allowed? No. So why is an alternate flavour for gnolls out of the question?

Actually, Mialee was listed as an Elf name for females in the PH1.  As she is the iconic Elf Wizard, this might have been an anomaly, and I always thought she should have been converted into Eladrin.  However, Elves getting Int seem to serve supporting her.  But they always had that intention, unless they meant to make her an anomaly. 

And Gnolls getting into Dragon before Minotaurs could mean any number of things: that they prefer Minotaur material to Gnoll material, and thus wanted us to pay for Minotaurs, while they could throw away Gnolls to the free testers of the magazines; it could mean that Gnolls simply got a submission from a writer first; it could mean that they had different standards then. 

Playing Gnolls was very poorly written, while Playing Minotaurs was actually well-written, though Crimson provides, IMHO, a better Minotaur write-up.

In any case, alternate flavour of Gnolls doesn't fit with how they've been characterised thus far.  Especially Gnolls as hyenas that hang out with faeries.  Primal Minotaurs have been justified in the context of their conflict with Baphomet, as have civilised Minotaurs.  Primal Gnolls may even be justified.  But Faerie Gnolls?  No.  Just no.