While I feel this sounds like a subtle edition war statement I felt the need to respond.
I think the problem comes from the fact that in the 30 years people have played the game there always was rules dealing with roleplaying. This has caused an ingrained understanding of if you cannot directly figure it out you can make a die roll to explain it.
Now we come to 4E and that paradigm has changed. No longer do you have a die roll to explain certain things. In many respects there are no hard and fast rules to define them. In fact they have to be arbitrated.
Hmm, I have to disagree with you here. There were no hard rules for roleplaying in 1e or 2e- that was a 3e thing. The closest thing was Etiquette NWP, which gave you an idea of what could be said or done in a situation that would be appropriate, but it wasn't possible for the die roll to take the place of roleplaying. Compare with 3e, where Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate can be used by RAW to simply be a die roll to make an NPC do something. Ironically enough, 3e was the first time it was possible to take roleplaying and turn it into roll-playing (and yes, I did game with some folks who did this, ugh). 4e still retains these "roleplaying" skills, but their importance has been lessened, since a single die roll won't be likely to make an NPC behave a certain way in skill challenges (if you go by the RAW for 4e), wheras in 3e, a single high Diplomacy roll could do just that by RAW. Of course, I don't use the social skills this way, and use a success or failure as a slight modification of how the NPC behaves based on the player's RP of the situation.
So I'm not sure what you're thinking of when you say 1e/2e had hard rules for roleplaying. The only things I can think of are you might be interpreting that wat are the paladin's code, morale rules, or the NPC interaction table used when the party first runs into a group of NPCs (which IME wasn't used all that much- DM's pretty much just did what made sense for a situation). So yes, DMs and players had to rely more on their freeform RPG muscles in previous editions, but I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
A classic example of this is training a horse to do tricks. In all past editions in particular 3.X there were defined rules in how to do that. Now in 4E it is not so well defined. This leaves room for interpretation on how you wish to approach the situation.
4E was the first edition in many years of D&D to move away from providing rules on roleplaying and focus solely on roll-playing. It focuses heavly on tactical style play, which for many is a good thing. Those who are not fans of it feel it speaks to them more like Warhammer (the tactical game). To each their own of course.
But lets rememember if for 30+ years you are told one way of doing something, and then suddenly it changes on you. You will probably be resistant as well. In most cases a factioning will occur.
True enough, 4e doesn't have hard rules for animal training, although it is handled under the Nature skill. This is left up to the DM's judgement, which IMO is where it belongs. Let me try to explain in this case why less is better...
One of the things that always bugged me about 3e was that it tried to be everything to everybody by having hard rules for almost every situation...but in doing so, it actually limited DM and player options. If the DM wanted to change the way something worked in his game, this could be met by howls of indignation from players of "thats not how the PHB/DMG says to handle this!" And yes, even among buddies, I have two that are rules lawyers that did just that. IME using your animal training case, 3e presented a list of tricks the animal could learn, and players cherry-picked from that list what they wanted their animal to be able to do based on what gave the biggest in-game advantages. It might work, but its also rather boring- and people tended to stick with the list and not invent many of their own tricks, as they did in previous editions of D&D where it was less codified. For example in 1e and 2e, I have DMed where we've had five animal companions over the years where we used DM fiat and judgement for what the animal could do and learn, and it played MUCH better in the campaign than the codified 3e rules. YMMV, of course.
What I'm trying to say is the more you codify rules for the game, the more limiting you tend to make the game because people tend to think along lines of what already is spelled out for them. 3e tried to reduce DM judgement and fiat by having so many hard rules in the game, and IMO, suffered for it. Apparently many people and the 4e designers felt the same way, and decided DM fiat and judgement isn't such a bad thing, and in fact is what makes this game so fun and magical. 4e does have a codified combat system (as did every edition of D&D to this point), but its far less codified out of combat, which gives more player freedom, so I honestly have a hard time seeing where people say 4e= roll-playing or that its impossible to roleplay in 4e???? We've got the same thing with 4e we did with 1e/2e, where strict role-playing mechanics simply didn't exist. Thats a good thing to me.
