Mercule
Adventurer
I can't really get behind that statement. I've used psionics as standard/core since the 1e PHB. Until the XPH came out, 3.5 didn't have all the desired features, IMO. Similar statements could be made by fans of lots of the 2e "Options" books until at least Unearthed Arcana.I the world of Quality Control, there's a difference between completeness and correctness. A thing is complete when it has all the desired features. it is correct when all those features have no bugs.
As far as that analogy goes, 3e was complete, but not correct.
4e is as complete as 3e, in most ways. It has the "original three" (magic-user, fighter, cleric) and the "basic four" (wizard, fighter, cleric, rogue/thief). It's also got a number of player races. If you're looking at the structure of the game, it's as complete as 3e was with the PHB, DMG, and MM. The lack of druid and barbarian are no more significant than the lack of psionics (personally, I'd prefer to see both psi and shadow show up before primal, but that's life).
Of course, you could always argue that 4e doesn't yet support summoners. But 3.5 didn't support true-name magic until near it's end. Both are pretty big staples of fantasy fiction. There's probably a similar analogy for most "missing" pieces of 4e.
That doesn't mean 4e is without flaw any more than 3(.5)e was. I'm not particularly sold by the homogeneous power mechanic and would rather see a subsystem by power source -- but it doesn't bother me any more than the traditional slots did.
As far as the original question, I'm not sure what I think of a game that evolves too readily. With 3e, you could walk away for a couple of years and return to find the baseline how you left it. Sure, you might not recognize the warlock or swordsage, but skills still worked the same. Even if skills did change, the variants were (generally speaking) confined to Unearthed Arcana, which made the re-learning fairly straightforward.
As I'm about to embark on a 12-18 month nWoD campaign, I'd be a bit put out to come back only to find out that I had to buy PHB/DMG 2-4 just to be up to date on the current state of the base game rules. On the other hand, I don't want to see problem systems retained just because they were published early on.