See, this right here is why listening to various people talk about the game is so problematic. They present their points as facts, not opinions. None of the points Shazman makes are actually facts. They are certainly his opinion, and there may be varying levels of evidence to back them up, but, none of them are actually facts.
/snip If you don't like the way all classes have the same structure, or that everyone has at-wills/encounter/dailies, you know that 4E isn't for you. If you don't like having to focus fire on one kobold for three rounds to drop it, you know that 4E isn't for you. If you don't like some of the excessive gamist/metagamey things in 4E like martial healing, divine challenge, healing surges, hit points aren't physical damage yet you can become "bloodied" and "dying" by losing hit points, you know that 4E isn't for you. You can get all of this information about 4E without reading the entire PHBI or playing several sessions of it.
People can make all sorts of claims on the Internet without needing any evidence to back them up. Until such time as evidence is given, it's just a case of dueling anecdotes.
Take the grind issue for example. Some people claim that combat in 4e takes massive amounts of time. But, let's look at the evidence shall we?
On one hand, we have access to four WOTC podcasts, three run by a WOTC designer, and one run by just some guy. The podcast members were certainly not rules experts - in the Robot Chicken podcast, one of the players had never played a table top RPG in his life.
Yet, in all four podcasts, 16 hours of recorded playtime, we have fights that never last more than about 40 minutes, most lasting far less. In the Robot Chicken podcast, for example, they have five encounters in less than four hours. The DM's commentary even makes a point that the first encounter doesn't occur until the 40 minute mark. That's 5 encounters in a hair over 3 hours remaining. Certainly no grind there.
In the "Posterity" thread here on En World, a number of players are reporting combats that last less than an hour, with longer ones usually being special encounters - big boss type things.
OTOH, I have a number of people, many of whom actively dislike 4e, some of whom do not even play 4e and almost never have, claiming that 4e combat takes hours to play. That it "takes 3 rounds of focus fire to drop a kobold". Most of the grind claims are coming from those who are pretty antagonistic towards 4e as a whole.
About the only claim I've seen so far from someone whose opinion I actually trust is MerricB's. Here's someone who has not been constantly bitching about 4e saying that he has problems with combat length. I'm not sure if it's really a problem, but, it does carry a fair bit more weight.
But, that's my point. Those claiming that fights take all these hours refuse to provide any actual evidence beyond anecdotes from their games. People used to claim 3 hour combats in 3e too, yet, I don't think that was too common.
So, no, listening to random internet guy about making a decision about the mechanics of a game is not getting an accurate picture. At best you're simply playing into your own observation bias.
