The irony is that I got banned out of innumerable threads for saying things that are in this article. In fact, to this day there are people who will claim that any statement that suggested 4e took design hints from World of Warcraft is blatant nonsense and such statements have ulterior motives.
There's a difference between designing a TTRPG to be accessible to potential crossover fans from MMO RPGs (or CRPGs or CCGs, for that matter), and designing a 'tabletop MMO.' And, frankly, as MMOs /are/ still RPGs, even that's not as bad as the actual claims people had push back against: that 4e somehow "wasn't an RPG."
But, it was ultimately a fool's errand, I suppose. The path just hasn't ever been mainstream > MMO > TT, it was never going to become 'all paths lead to D&D.' Probably there's a lot more TT > CRPG > MMO than the reverse. You discover TTRPGs, your group breaks up (or you never can find one in the first place), so you turn to a CRPG based on it, then MMOs when they come out. If you're an MMO fan, and your MMO goes bust, there'll be another one along soon, if your guild breaks up, there are others forming all the time. TT is just less convenient to pull together.
It'd've been great to bring in more new players from anywhere - MMO, CCG, or direct from the mainstream, since D&D has the name recognition - but that had to be tempered with remaining acceptable to the existing hard core, and I guess there just wasn't enough appeasement on that end.
I was in fact actually happy with what I perceived as some of the goals of the design. It was only later that people took up my comments about how the design was taking cues from World of Warcraft as a sign that the new design was "too video gamey" or that the design was taking queues from how the MtG team had cleaned up the rules in 6e to make them more machine readable "too much like a board game".
Nod. There's legitimate observations, and then there's h4ters running with 'em and making them out to be something they're not. (I expect there will be folks quoting the article as 'Proof 4e was never an RPG!')
My core complaint against the design as it actually emerged is buried innocuously in the article at the point I stopped reading: "Ideally, it would help DMs enough to make running a bad game nearly impossible." That idea was the one really bad idea that I feel undermined all the other ones.
It doesn't seem, on the face of it, to be a frightful idea: Make the game easier to run, so that when a new group does form spontaneously, the novice DM won't accidentally deliver a horrible first experience and knock himself and half-a-dozen friends out of the hobby for good.
It does seem overly ambitious: "Easier to Run" would've been plenty, considering how challenging DMing has always been.