I have a question for the supporters of 4E. Why did you ever play D&D? If all previous editions (prior to 4E) failed to meet your needs or wants, why did you play it? There are literally hundreds of other options.
I started with a game that was a combination of 2e and 1e rules. It was after 2e came out but was our group didn't like all the rules in it, so they used some replacement rules from 1e. I was taught the rules by the rest of the group and it wasn't until a couple of YEARS after I started playing that I noticed all the rules from 1e we were using.
At any rate, I like D&D because it is fun to gather together with my friends, take on a role and kill monsters. I get to be the sneaky thief, the tough fighter, the holy cleric, the mysterious wizard, and so on. I get to save people, be heroic, be powerful...all the things I'm not in real life.
When we switched from 2e to 3e we liked a lot of the changes. We had a lot of fun with the new rules. Some didn't go over that well. I remember some people hating the lack of "realism" in that you couldn't backstab people anymore, because it was impossible to get behind them. I remember an argument about flatfootedness early on where one of my friends thought it was so stupid that he wouldn't try to dodge out of the way of attacks that were coming towards him simple because the game told him he was "flatfooted".
But mostly, it was good changes.
Monsters used the players rules so they were tougher. We found that monsters died way too easy in 2e and often combat was a tedious dice rolling exercise. No one except the wizard and cleric had anything to do but roll and attack roll and damage each round. No other choices. We didn't bother using minis before because it didn't really matter where you were. If you were close enough to an enemy, you made an attack, if you weren't, you had to move that round.
But now combat had all sorts of options. You could grapple people, bullrush them, use cool powers. As a rogue you could get better damage EVERY round instead of being restricted to getting a backstab in once every couple of combats when you happen to be hidden before the combat and could somehow stay hidden and make it behind the enemy. It was more interesting, more dynamic. Because other options were so substandard or caused so many headaches for the DM, we had simplified combat in our 2e games to pointing at a player and having them respond with two numbers: AC hit and damage dealt. Init had been simplified to one roll to a side, go around the table clockwise.
And there was very little we disliked about 3e. At first. With the more interesting combats came more complication. A lot more complication. There were SO many different options that it took hours to make characters. We had to search through 10 different books for feats, for spells, for new weapons, for PrC, and so on. We had to consider each level completely separately since 9th level might be better to be taken as a Fighter level, followed by a Rogue level at 10 and a PrC at level 11. And rules worked together in weird, unforeseen ways. If you allowed a player to get the Dark template from one book, suddenly he was able to Hide in Plain Sight, allowing him to essentially stay invisible continuously with no way of stopping it. He got sneak attacks on every one of his attacks(Or did he? Does hiding go away after you attack even if it is in plain sight? What if someone has Darkvision so there was no concealment for darkness? And how did that work with other classes powers and some PrC powers and some feats? And...so on).
It started causing some other problems. Now that the game was more balanced, we started noticing the imbalances. Wizards are too powerful, Clerics are way too powerful, Bards suck. Frenzied Berzerkers could outperform most other characters.
Creating a monster that could challenge PCs who spent 6-7 hours making up their characters was difficult. You needed to pick and choose feats just as carefully as they did. You needed to spend 6-7 hours making a monster to counter it. And the monster would still die in 2 rounds of combat. Also, players could come up with spells that would completely bypass all the interesting challenges I'd come up for them. They'd use Scrye and Teleport in order to skip 6 encounters I had carefully planned. They'd use Dispel Magic to disable an interesting magic trap instead of solving the puzzle I planned.
So I stopped writing adventures. I would only run published adventures, since I no longer wanted to do that amount of work for so little payoff. Only there were still problems with that. Whenever a monster had spell-like abilities, I'd need to have the full text of those powers memorized or I'd have to look them up at the table. Otherwise, if I tried to work from memory, my players would notice. I'd forget the range of Dispel Magic or I'd forget that the area version only effects one spell on each target in the area. I'd forget SOMETHING and have my players remind me. Since their pool of knowledge amongst the 5 of them was greater than mine. I'd need to know what all the feats in the game did since the monster could have any of them. I'd often forget what one did and just not use it to avoid slowing down the game. Then find out afterwords that without the feat, the monster was a lot less powerful.
I really missed the ability to improvise. If I attempted to add a unique magic trap to the game to provide a bit of a change of pace, my players would be wondering why they can't Dispel it, why they can't just teleport to the other side, why their special ability didn't seem to stop it, how someone could build a trap like that when it seemed more powerful than 9th level spells, how someone could afford to make an epic spell that did it and why would an epic level wizard be creating traps in the first place. The game was consistent, the rules were the same for players and monsters, so if the players had to be 26th level and pay 2.7 million gp in order to create a trap, so did the monsters or NPCs. If Dispel Magic could dispel an effect, it had to work on ALL effects, not just ones the DM wanted the PCs to pass that easily. If a spell didn't exist for something, then it couldn't be done(or at least it couldn't be done without complaining from my players who thought it was unfair that NPCs had spells that they didn't).
I took so many steps to speed up combat because each round was an exercise in math. Which effects ran out this round? What effects were added this round? How does my increase of strength increase my to hit and damage? Did you remember the Righteous Wrath of the Faithful, Bard Song, Prayer, Heroes Feast, Bull's Strength, Bless, and Marshal Aura? What does that make the total modifier on your attacks? Which ones stack?
It didn't stop us from playing it. We still loved the combats, even if we were disappointed at how short they were(in terms of number of rounds) and how we had to play second fiddle to the Frenzied Berzerker and the Cleric. We loved saving people, being heroic, and having cool powers despite all the rules arguments over how they worked together. I liked running games despite all the work I had to put into it.
But when 4th came out, it was a breath of fresh air. It had all of the things I liked about the switch from 2e to 3e(no more THACO, actual prices for magic items, simplified mechanic, interesting tactical combat, cool powers) without the stuff that caused the headaches for me(multiclassing being so open that it added a large amount of time to character creation, most of the skill in the game being to combine rules in ways that make them more powerful, the massive stacking of effects, the large amount of prep time, having to consult rules constantly, page long descriptions for spells filled with exceptions, monsters that go down in one hit, monsters that kill you in one hit, save or dies...and so on).
But it still lets me be a sneaky thief, a tough fighter, a mysterious wizard, holy cleric and it still gives me cool powers to save the princess, kill the bad guy and be heroic.
