Curious, not really familiar with anybody IRL that hasn't embraced 5E as the new standard: it's sort of the ultimate expression of my experience of D&D, at any rate.
I think there are few people who HATE 5e, there really is little about it to hate, though some things do bug me quite a bit. Still, 2e had PLENTY of things that bugged me as well, it was still an improvement over 1e in most respects. 5e likewise improves on 2e, but it kinda is just going sideways otherwise. It is kind of an ultimate expression of the trends and desires of people who were playing D&D in the late-1e/2e time frame when the purely Gygaxian approach to the game kinda lost its wheels. In that sense its a quite good reprise of many elements of 2e, finally recast in a much more sensible and friendly form. It just doesn't do action-adventure anything like as well as 4e did, IMHO.
I think there are a lot of people who, oddly enough, consider 3.5 to still be within the realm of classic D&D, but that don't see a point to 5e's clear departure from that realm (particularly in terms of spell-casting I assume, since 3.x fighters are already pretty much totally different from 2e ones). Anyway, I can't speak for those people, I merely observe that many people I knew that were playing 3.5 and didn't buy 100% into 4e, even if they played it and really enjoyed it, simply went back to 3.5 and haven't bothered with 5e. I can't even get into a 5e game, unless I go play with people I don't know. Its popular enough, in general, but seems to be far from universally lauded as some would have you believe.
We had a lot of combat in our games; it was just short, dirty and quickly resolved with some crazy die rolls. Positioning and tactics were not important, though in 3.x (like 5E), it could be.
I just didn't find 5e combat that INTERESTING. It was usually pretty much obvious what the next move was, and any real cleverness would happen at other levels of the game.
For example, when we played through Phandelver we of course came upon the Dragon, and said dragon then (after the module ended) tried to thwart my character's scheme to build a new barony seated at the old Castle Cragmaw. Our characters of course were entirely unable to confront this, being maybe 3rd level or so at the time. There simply was no tactical option or merely tactical/operational trick that was going to make dealing with a high CR creature feasible. Honestly this would have been pretty much true in 4e as well, but 5e is singularly silent in terms of presenting any framework for achieving any OTHER sort of success besides combat.
Instead we went on to another adventure, which involved gaining entry to a tower which was warded by an utterly impenetrable magical barrier. Except persistence eventually allowed us to find a procedure for entering and exiting. Being clever we managed to repurpose this dungeon into a giant unescapable dragon trap. This was entertaining, and we got rid of the heinous worm this way, which was cool and fine. It just illustrated that 5e didn't really provide any tactical options, whereas 2e might well have done so (difficult and perilous though they might have been). Its just a remarkably non-tactical game!
Another consideration to the "feels" of 4E versus other editions: the books were set up as reference manuals without a lot of fun reading potential. See the 4E MM versus the 5E one, more stats, less flavor. That focus on everything feeding into tactical, systematically complete systems was a somewhat new take, that did not fit everyone's tastes.
Sent from my BLU LIFE XL using
EN World mobile app
Now, see, I had a lot of fun reading the 4e MM1. I thought it really had a good bit of lore. It tended to allow a lot of things to be mostly implicit though, a power often speaks directly to the nature of a monster without a lot of excess verbiage. Part of the problem with older editions was that often there was NOTHING mechanically about a monster which supported its 'fluff' at all! 4e tended to be the opposite, the nature of the beast was explicit! I also liked the way MM1 provided additional lore check results, something that later MMs inexplicably excluded.
4e's DMG certainly seemed quite readable as well, being a fairly good treatise on DMing (at least assuming you accepted some of its assertions about the nature of D&D adventuring in 4e). The PHB was definitely intended to be a reference manual, though it does NOT lack in flavor text (actually I recall doing an analysis of this point and discovering it compares favorably with the 3.5, 2e, and 1e PHBs in this respect, all of them being very roughly a 50/50 mix of flavor and other elements).
I would just add that I personally find 5e's DMG and PHB to be incredibly annoying documents which detract constantly from my enjoyment of the game, as their organization is actively antithetical to providing references when you need them, leading to a lot of "I throw up my hands, the rule for A is simply not evident, just do X" followed next week by someone finally finding the obscure place where the rule for A was finally uncovered lurking at the end of some paragraph of fluff in a different section of the book. Gah! I routinely read and discard entire systems for this sort of crime. At my age I simply don't have time and patience to thoroughly memorize rulebooks or keep rereading them just to find every little element. In fact this is actually my #1 beef with 5e, particularly as a DM.