While I'm about to post some contrary opinions, I want to say that your post is one of the clearest and most forthright I've seen on these topics.
When 4e came out and I tried it, I had a majorly averse reaction. This was not because of the game by itself. I am sure had it been marketed under any other brand name, and, much more importantly, would not have come with a, from my view, complete mess up of the Forgotten Realms, changes to other things like naming half the elves Eladrin, I would have liked it.
Nod. I've never been a fan of FR, so that wasn't on my radar. Symantic distinctions like high-elf vs eladrin are easy to ignore, or even poke fun at, you don't even have to change actual rules to do it, just labels and flavor text. My second 4e character was an Eladrin Wizard McFighter who called himself a 'High Elf' (The PH even says that's what some call the Eladrin) and whom I'd describe out of character as a "fighter/magic-user;" he was always grubbing up ritual books because he set great store in learning as many rituals as possible.
I re-skinned some of his gear or class abilities as magic items (I rationalized being able to cast scorching burst all day as having a 'wand of (lesser) fire-balls'), explained that he learned magic from an ancestor's spellbook from a 'time before, when magic worked differently' (AD&D), so he'd make comments like "My ancestors notes mention memorizing Tenser's Floating Disk, but I've never been able to manage it - just as well, I suppose, since I memorized Sleep today, and I wouldn't have been able to cast it /his/ way without spending even more time re-momorizing than this ritual-casting will take..."
4e has a lot of flexibility in 'flavor,' and had a lot of nostalgic fun with that character acting a bit like a classic Elven Fighter/Magic-User (with not a single actual 'house rule' required, just a lot of messing with flavor text and backstory). So 'feel' can be a somewhat flexible and very personal thing.
As it was, it didn't feel like D&D to me at all. It was like a betrayal by the game designers, and with 2 exceptions, everyone I knew felt the same way.
I can see how 4e doesn't quite feel like D&D, but it's a matter of degree. I found 4e good enough on it's merits and 'close enough' to D&D that I didn't mind the different feel, and, like I said, above, I could change feel a lot just messing with flavor text while leaving the rules intact.
D&D started out emulating the broader fantasy genre (very broad, as they included HP Lovecraft among their influences), and failed to capture it in a number of ways. It then rested on it's early success for 25 years or so, and that flawed genre-emulation because a sub-genre all it's own. D&D went from a poor simulation of fantasy, to a perfect simulation of itself, in a way.
4e is probably a better take on heroic fantasy than D&D ever had been before - with a good does of cinematic action, to boot - but that made it a very poor simulation of D&D's self-defined de-facto sub-genre.
I have serious doubts that the edition wars in regards to 4e are based on how the game plays in most cases. As it was just pointed out, you rename some things and change the background and the same people who hate hate hate 4e suddenly like it.
So when someone goes at you for playing a board game, miniature game, how messed up the rules are or whatever, most of the time what they are saying is "how can you support the edition that betrayed all that our D&D stood for?" Harass the 4e players, so they might stop playing (as if) and maybe 4e will fail and we get the "real" D&D back.
That's an articulation of the "h4ter" camp's position that's as articulate and sympathetic as I ever heard. I wish we'd heard that sort of thing much earlier on, or better yet, instead of all the bizzare accusations of 'board game' and 'MMO' and so forth.
Ultimately, though, the "h4ters'" campaign worked, and 4e is dead. 5e may even qualify as "real D&D" - that is, go back to emulating the self-referent sub-genre D&D created for itself through sheer inertia back in the day. I'd had enough of that particular sub-genre by 1995, and even if I feel a nostalgic whim for it, I can satisfy it with a character like Varinhal or a campaign subtley tweaked in that direction or one of the odd 1e AD&D games I see at the local con each year. 4e presents me with a lot more potential, a bigger slice of the fantasy genre to explore with one system, so I'll be playing it for the foreseeable future if 5e limits itself to just the "real D&D feel."
The 2 people from my groups who also play 4e say that they just ignored the changes to the settings and racial backgrounds and added a few house rules. Something we basically did a lot with all editions.
Of course, now some other 4e players claim that they do not really play 4e
4e's the first edition that I haven't felt the need to house-rule much at all. The mutable, divorced-from-the-mechanics approach to flavor text provide enough flexibility, and, as a DM, I do /add/ things willy-nilly, as I love creating new monsters and magic items.
In spite of not feeling the need to use them, I have come up with lots of possible variants for 4e, as I'm an inveterate rules-tinker. As such, I've noticed a sort of sea-change in the community starting with 3e, actually. Variants are called 'house-rules' nowadays, and accorded very little interest - and often no respect at all - "you can do that, but it's a house rule" became the cut sublime of 3.x rules debates. RAW became sacred and inviolable. It seemed bizarre to me, as someone who'd always modified games heavily and liked reverse-engineering them, but it was quite pronounces, and, AFAICT, still alive and well.
