Ah, but should it cheese you off (I pun!) as much if this individual instead says, "I understand you don't like Roquefort. In fact, it was hard for me to get used to. Here's how I did it: I took this can of sardines, see? And this turnip? I got out my food processer..."
The above would generate much the same feeling in me as when my mother would say to me, "Here, you should try some of this cole slaw.", and I would reply, "Thank you, but I don't like cole slaw.", and she would reply, "Yes, but this is good cole slaw."
There is a certain amount of condescension inherent in the attitude, however well meaning. What if I don't like sardine or turnips? While it's true that some preferences are based on ignorance, it is by no means certain that all preferences are based on ignorance and in particular you should avoid immediately assuming that any dissagreement in a opinion with your own is based on ignorance.
My mother simply found it impossible to imagine that I wouldn't like anything that she did like. In point of fact, I eventually discovered I did like cole slaw - just not the cole slaw prepared in the style that she liked. I still don't like the cole slaws my mother likes. My dislike of them was based on familiarity - not ignorance.
In the same way, I find it hard to imagine that there are many people who are actually veterens D&D players that don't accept that hit points are abstract. They might not accept that hit points are fully abstract. They might not accept that hit points should be as abstract as they are in 4e. But actual ignorance of the fact that in PC's the majority of their hitpoints represent something other than physical hardiness seems very hard for me to fathom given how much that fact is a part of D&D lore since the days of 1st edition. People tell jokes about it. They make cartoons about it. They laugh about it. They rant against it. They write essays on it. They mock it. They praise it, and some people have outright dropped the game system over it. Gygax devoted a significant portion of page 82 of the 1st edition DMG to the topic, beginning with the statement: "It is quite unreasonable to assume that as a character gains levels of ability in his or her class that a corresponding gain in actual ability to sustain physical damage takes place."
But if you read what Gygax wrote on page 82 in its entirety, it becomes quite clear that Gygax's abstraction and that of 4e flow from largely incompatible philosophies. For one thing, he ends that section by stating, "However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical
and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points." The emphasis is mine, and its intended to show that even though Gygax thought of hit points in partially abstract terms, the basic assumption is that the metaphysical injury to ones luck, destiny, or skill could be expected to heal naturally no faster than we'd expect his physical injuries to heal. The modern philosophy suggests that if you've managed to survive the recent past, then the game should quickly reset so that the experience can be repeated.
Gygax was thinking more along the lines of a dungeon as a whole, where the wearing away of hit points over the course of the entire foray would eventually force a retreat of some sort (usually to a haven outside of the dungeon) in order to reset. Success is therefore defined as the ability to horde hit points until you obtain your goal, and the more experienced party will shine compared to the less experienced in its ability to horde every single hit point. In the 4e module, the emphasis is less on the environment as a whole, as on the single encounter and the challenge it provides in and of itself. The only granularity is at the level of healing surges, as any loss of hit points smaller than a single healing surge is more or less identical, and even this requires little real consumption of resources given the emphasis on resetting and refortifying the party. Hording every hit point isn't as important. Preserving resources across a long series of encounters is often unnecessary, and even undesirable.
The result is much more markedly different from 1st edition than 3rd edition was, and moves away from the feel of 'doing 1st edition better than 1st edition did' that brought me back to D&D. With 1st edition (and 2nd) I was happy with the feel and the style, but not the rules. With 4e, I'm sure the rules are mostly fine, but I've no interest in the feel or the style.
