Me, I treat each edition of D&D as separate and distinct. I try to leave my assumptions at the door and amend my approach as a player and DM to best fit the version I'm playing. To do otherwise seems strange to me. They're different games, not software upgrades of the same game.
Interestingly, software upgrades are exactly how I see each version of D&D. I think of game systems as tools that are available to DMs to help facilitate running the game at their table, just like word processing software helps facilitate composition. (A programming language or environment might be an even better analogy than word processoring software.)
In contrast to what you wrote above, the type of game I want to play and my style of DMing determines my choice of game system to a much greater extent than vice versa. Accordingly, my DMing style and the "basic conversation" at my table hasn't changed much between editions, and probably doesn't exactly match the high-level "how to play" overview of any of them. I already know how I want to play at my table, and I'm not planning to change that just because the phrasing in the book changed.