Polls are not really a fair assessment of anything. I checked out your post to see what it was all about and here you link it to an edition war thread. IMO, you should have let your arguments stand on their own. Now it just feels like a trap instead of a place to discuss likes and dislikes. I thought people brought up good points on each side, now, it feels like you just wanted people to come out of the closest and express views or read your thread when they might not have before.
Why is the other thread an "edition war" thread? Just because the original poster (who
wasn't me) started a poll asking people for their preferred edition?
I know that internet polls are purely anecdotal. However, this poll probably represents a more accurate snapshot of the mood on ENWorld since it takes so little time to answer, while posting in this thread or others takes considerably more effort and thus the posts are much less likely to be representative.
(And I really don't get the "trap" claim, either...)
I found those results very interesting. In your linked thread it appears that 4e is more popular, but that doesn't really mean anything. When I was manning the Dragon Roots Magazine booth at GenCon I got a lot of feed back from people telling me that they either were stuck in AD&D or wanted more 3.5 content. Very few actually said they made the move to 4e.
It could just as well be that 4E fans are less vocal because they are more content with the new edition, while those who don't like it are much more likely to speak up because they are dissatisfied. That's a rather old phenomenon - it's the exceptions which are more noticeable than the norm.
However, you can't claim that poll for anything unless you force every ENWorld member to read and vote on it.
I said that that poll was "more accurate" than individual posts, not "absolutely accurate". At the very least, it has a far greater number of responses, which tends to count for a lot in statistics.
Too many supplements spoils the game, but a nice balance is fine. By dismissing everything but the core rules you have limited the game.
When I'm buying RPG supplements, I'm primarily interested in setting materials, and I follow multiple game lines - not just D&D. Thus, I play D&D only part of the time, and I have little interest in purchasing pure rules supplements unless they are particularly awesome.
To my mind, an RPG system - any RPG system - should be able to stand on the merits of its core rule set alone, without the help of any supplements. I realize that other people see things differently, but that's my general approach.
They had to leave out those classes, instead of taking up 3 pages per class, each class not takes up 10 or more pages because of the need to add in more powers. It is the biggest PHB in the history of D&D and it doesn't cover everything.
I think the 3.5 PHB had a similar page count
and it had a much smaller font size - 10 pt. instead of 12 pt. or something like that. If they had used a smaller font size for the 4E PHB, they could have put more material into it. I realize that other people like the new font size, but I am not one of them.
As to having to reply on certain supplements to make certain classes more interesting, well, it goes both ways. Wizards are interesting, an Incantrix is more so, an Arch Mage even more.
Wizards were plenty interesting with the 3.5 rules alone. I can't say the same thing for fighters.
Fighters by themselves, with just the 3.5 core books, were fun to play and it was up to the player to be creative to find new uses for the feats and such. Sorry if you never figured that out.
Well, give me some examples. What kinds of builds - using the 3.5 core books alone - would have resulted in a fighter who could, say, use four different combat maneuvers in a single, "typical" fight that each represented effective tactics?
IMO, the only difference in combat dynamics is that now, because of WOTC “balancing” the math of the game, the minions can actually hit the PCs at higher levels because it is harder to get outrageous ACs. Other than that, they still seem to pose the same threat as the 3.5 minions.
In 3.5, low-level NPCs and monsters represented no threat at all to high-level PCs. Any enemies that were actually capable of hitting such PCs also had a fairly large number of hit points which made it next to impossible of killing such foes with one hit. That 4E minions work differently changes the combat dynamics significantly. In 3.5, such foes were basically boring - no more than a kind of obstructive terrain that the PCs would have to deal X points of damage to get to their real enemies. Now minions are a danger in their own right and can no longer be ignored.
Becoming a real threat to the PCs is a huge difference from "no threat at all".
), passionate about their game, aware of events in the industry - may not be representive of the population of gamers at large. 
