Its easy to forget that 4e was, in fact D&D, and, though it was challenged successfully by PF (which, only technically wasn't D&D) in some calendar quarters, was far too popular to be called 'niche' in the RPG context (though, to be fair, the entire RPG industry was a pretty small niche between the end of the success of 1e in the 80s and 5e, today).
So thus myth that 4e only catered to one play style isn't credible. 4e was as close to reasonably balanced as D&D has yet come, balance is conducive to /wider range of styles/, without resorting to rules-tinkering.
You're telling me this but you aren't substantiating it. For example: you assume a more balanced mechanical implementation meant the game was better at catering to all styles and ranges of play, but I don't think what you mean when you type that is what I mean when I consider the narrow range of play styles 4E worked with.
Of course, it didn't over-reward system mastery to nearly the degree 3.x did, didn't make specific strategies like scry/buff/teleport supreme or anything like that, so if a style hinged on something like that, it was no longer "supported" in the sense of achieving markedly better results than others.
It also didn't make it possible to narrate a coherent story with applied risk and reward that felt thematic and appropriate to the fantasy genre. What it did do well was dungeons, filled with dragons, and the extremely archetypal type of D&D that WotC had honed in on, lightning-rod style.
Contrarily, classic D&D could be played in virtually any style the DM cared to encourage through variants or DM 'force,' or even just with the simple ultimatum "you run something, then." 4e was so easy to run that, well O.K., they will.
I feel like maybe you were a player a lot more than a DM? I was a DM only, and my handful of player experiences were some of the worst, most narratively shallow gaming experiences I'd ever been subjected to.
5e though compromised. It's not nearly so balanced or easy to run as 4e was, it does over-reward system mastery some, and does return most of the imaginary power of the play dynamic to the DM side of the screen.
Ironic, then, that it is more friendly to my style of gaming. Maybe, just maybe 4E wasn't really as universal as you suggest? Note that I am not suggesting 5E is any more universal....it also has its limits.
And, it has AL.
So DMs can run it prettymuch however they want, but there is a consistent rule set, in AL, to be mastered. The biggest complaint, on that end, is that it's just too easy.
I've never been involved in or care about organized play but it seems like every edition of D&D handles this reasonably well.
So, you didn't find yourself playing in a /familiar/ way.
I found 4e easier to manage by visualizing the battlefield than 3e. Mainly because cubes are pretty easy, that way. As a consequence of counting diagonal as 1 as, circles and blasts became squares. (cubes in 3D)
That's a major simplification from from spreads and cones and spheres and 180 degree fans and whatnot - each of which, at each possible size, had a specific template to match it to the grid.
Gah.
But, because enough of that was /familiar/ from late-2e C&T, maybe it was OK, while the simpler, easier to visualize, but unfamiliar, squares were not.
I've played D&D (and dozens of other RPGs) for 38 years now and I am only sort of sure I know what you are talking about above. But it suggests to me you've never played D&D with a strong narrative TotM focus before.
None of those were gone, just, different (arguably, more consistently) implemented.
Disease got it's own sub-system that spanned across the usual daily cycle, so actually quite a bit more than a speed bump (also a pretty flexible little sub-system that could have been adapted to curses, long-term injuries or the like, but was under-utilized) - but compared to make a save or you need Cure Disease, maybe a little /unfamiliar/.
Try modelling a real disease with it, then. Or a fantasy disease with effects longer than a long rest or two. You could do that in 3rd and earlier without breaking the system or causing a clash in rules, with players feeling like you were rigging the system against them. Note that 5E brings some teeth back to this, but then cleverly (?) makes most saves easy to make, so the players feel like they narrowly avoid high threat consequences, while still keeping the consequences present, if less likely.
Poison was simply a damage type - very often ongoing damage, and could definitely kill you. Just not with a failed save - nor could Slow or Nuetralize Poison retroactively cure you from instant death. Another simplification, and while arguably intuitive, certainly /unfamiliar/.
Poison as a damage type is fine, and probably one of the better simplifications that made sense. However poison in the real world (and fantasy fiction, film, and practically anywhere except D&D) remains more interesting and serious with lots of risk and narrative potential for the threat. None of that appears in any significant way in 4E, which was obsessed with designing around the idea of immediate consequences in combat and limiting the book keeping because it assumed a larger player base would appear that was just gunshy of keeping track of too many things (and then still failed in that respect).
As far as "Actual Physical Health," hps, alone, may have been a /familiar/ model to you, but 4e's was just a little different, bringing surges into it. If you're used to thinking of a full-hp PC as being in perfect "Actual Physical Health," then one being at full hp after a 5min break may seem the same - but, it's not, he's down surges, which you can also pretend represent Actual Physical Health - If you can handle that /unfamiliar/ act of make believe.
Condescension of implying I'm somehow unable to adapt to the / unfamiliar / aside, I really don't think you have played in a narrative style with an effort toward a cohesive descriptive process in which combat is meant to be visual and interesting from the story side, with the mechanics hidden in the background. 4E works fine if you do not care about any sense that you are doing other than playing a game (as opposed to telling a collaborative story). Healing surges were a fundamental game changer to how damage worked and how you thought about PC health. It was a key "give" in the long standing question of "how much of a PC's hit points are just fatigue/stress?" and the answer was: literally all of it, right up until you hit zero HP and have no more healing surges left.
Healing surges weren't an /unfamiliar/ act of make believe. They were the antithesis of of good story telling at the expense of gamifying D&D so they could create mechanics experimenting with "player rewards" designed to keep players in the game under the illusion of skill.
Don't sweat it - you were actually very much on-topic, in an illustrative-example sort of way.
I think the way you play(ed) D&D and the way I have played it over the decades veered off significantly along the way. I could run some good games in 4E, but it did not support the way I had run D&D previously to that point. There were major implementations in the game which significantly impacted my ability to use the game in the same manner I had in prior decades. Were these changes bad? Not necessarily, but they created a different feel,a different beat to the game if you will that it turned out I no longer enjoyed...but even I hung on longer than my players did. I abandoned 4E when I finally gave in to the reality that it was no longer fun, not in the way we all cared about. Was it a great game for intense dungeon crawls and battles? Absolutely. Could it do literally anything else with minimal or no effort like all prior editions? Nope.
EDIT: super important! I am not actually trying to discredit your perceptions, claims or experiences with 4E, even though I am doing exactly that. I am instead trying to frame context around my own experiences with the game in various editions to maybe help illustrate how you and I could both have had very different and not particularly complimentary experiences. To you, you see a guy (me) who is having trouble with the /unfamiliar/ and not adapting well. To me, I see a guy who understood this quite well, and realized that the game had changed, and left a very large chunk of what I liked about it on the cutting room floor. You're view is not wrong, but neither is mine....and this is why 4E failed.
