To me, "old school" doesn't have so much to do with one or another spot rule as with the modules that made the old school: Keep on the Borderlands, Temple of Elemental Evil, Against the Giants, Tomb of Horrors...
If we believe what we have been said by the designers and the marketing guys at
WotC,
4e was designed specifically to make those modules impossible to play as they were. Traps work on a totally different way because they found the previous ones (the ones that appear on them) broken, unfun and unfair, the feeling of "anytime now I could drop dead if I fail a saving throw" has been actively avoided. Even the maps would need to be redrawn because now they're "too small to
4e" (as Mike Mearls stated in an article about this specific topic).
So, if
4e feels old school, and it has been (or so we've been told) designed to achieve the exact opposite results,
4e is a failure.
And yet another word from our sponsors
