I love all editions of D&D, but particularly close to my heart are Red Box Basic and 4e. Red Box because it's what we played the most and the longest back in the day. And 4e because many of its changes are things I house ruled or wanted to house rule in D&D. Things like:
At-will spells - I understood and agreed with the idea of Vancian magic as a limit on Wild Wizard Shenainigans. But I often thought that a magic-user should be able to use some low-level spells whenever they wanted. E.g., magic missile as a basic self-defense spell. Read magic whenever needed. Cantrips to give that wizardly sheen. Lo and behold, 4e does exactly this.
Fighter options - A two-fold problem. Giving fighters (and thieves) more to do at higher levels, and more interesting options than just extra attacks. In BD&D we did this via DM Fiat and stunting, but 4e did this elegantly by making combat more tactical, and giving minis a real purpose. Much fun.
Expanding the "sweet spot". Once we'd done "zero to hero", we tended to start characters at higher levels to create the kind of cimematic fantasy heroics that drew us to D&D in the first place. This is baked right into the game in 4e.
Tiered play - I loved the distinct meta-levels of BECM: dungeon -> wilderness -> domains -> world. I'm happy to see a similar progression again in the core rules.
And while I loved core 4e, I really love Essentials. Everything I loved about the core now tweaked even more to my taste! Plus, maps/dungeon/tiles and tokens!
Finally, the great thing about BD&D was the ease of set-up and prep for DMs. It was real easy to wing it. Now 4e has a similar ease to winging it, plus an easy system for creating accurately balanced (or unbalanced!) encounters or modifying modules. This was brought home to me when I set aside a good hour for reworking the sample dungeon in the Starter Set from 5 adventurers to only 2. In the end it only took me 20-30 minutes.
I'm glad to see all you other guys enjoying 4e, because as far as I can tell, it was expressly designed for me.
