TrippyHippy
Hero
Something that a lot of people who haven't played much 4e don't seem to understand is just how flexible and hackable the system is. You can build damage-oriented fighters, utility/control rogues, blaster wizards, and all sorts of other things. The roles are more about how classes lean than what you absolutely must do with them or the game punishes you.
However, putting many of these builds together requires a fair amount of system mastery, which is a problem of 4e. The system has a lot of options, but you really need to know what those options are and how they all work together if you're going to bash together an outside-the-box build option.
Another thing people who haven't played 4e don't always get is that the roles are mostly optional. The game's design is robust enough that you don't need any particular role for a party to work (although I do think that a party with a leader will almost always be more effective than a party without a leader, making it the closest 4e has to a mandatory role). The roles describe the way a class contributes to the party's success, but they don't describe crucial things you need to have in your party no matter what. It's also not the case that the roles synergize so well with each other that you need the combos to be effective. If you swap a defender for an extra striker, you lose some tankiness, but you gain a bunch of extra damage. You change your strategy a bit, but it still works out fine.
Everything you describe is precisely the style that doesn’t give me the flexibility to play how I like, or in the manner of the game I grew up with. It’s all just providing ‘builds’ and ‘roles’ and ‘combos’ and ‘system mastery’ and happy zapping. That’s not flexible to other styles of play at all. You say people who criticised haven’t played much 4E - let me ask how much you played other RPGs? What is the range of your roleplaying experiences?
But back to the original point again: 5E still lets you play it this way, as well as other styles too. It’s more inclusive and inherently flexible in it’s goals.