there are many who didn't like 4e because of the homogenized structure of characters
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This was compounded by the seeming sameness of the majority of powers (hp loss plus effect).
I always found this very strange. After all, most fighter abilities in all editions of D&D are just hit point loss plus effect (sometimes just effects without hit point loss). And many spells have this character as well (again, some are just effects wtihout hit point loss).
The playtest fighter doesn't strike me as being markedly more versatile in these sorts of respects, in any event. Perhaps I've missed something, though.
The true differences between classes is evident in play and primarily garnered from the character's role but when only perusing the rules or discussing things from only a theoretical perspective, the differences are not as obvious
This may well be so. I can't easily
internalise its truth, because the obvious differences in play between (say) (i) a fighter's "Tide of Iron" - single target weapon + push from a melee chassis, (ii) a wizard's "Thunderwave" - close burst thunder + push from a squishy, and (iii) a warlock's "Eyebite" - low damage with a Stealth enabler that might combine interestingly with Shadowwalk, seem pretty transparent to me. And when you look at the range of other at wills, and encounters, dailies, and utilities, the differences only increase.
D&D has been a successful game for a long time without being very well-balanced at all. While some of the rejection of 4e can reasonably be attributed to nostalgia, the usual resistance to change further abetted and amplified by the SRD/Pathfinder, and nerdrage, I can't reject out of hand the possibility that there's something else.
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It's also had really quite poor class balance for almost it's entire history (excepting 4e, of course). And, it's always had a system of rewarding frequent play with greater character power (experience). Put two together and you have an environment in which experienced players have a continual stream of new players to over-awe with their established characters and/or (particularly with 3e) their hard-won system mastery.
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I've heard the theory that the only thing 4e really goofed on was presentation. If it was a mistake, it was an understandable one. Being up-front with the mechanical commonalities of the classes made 4e much easier to learn.
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Unless, of course, the niche D&D had secretly carved out for itself was one of intellectual challenge and system-mastery rewards that thrived on the game taking some extra time and effort to learn and master. Thus the early criticism that 4e was 'dumbed down'
This is an intriguing theory.
I think there may be some truth to it in some cases, but I don't think it is generally true. So while I don't react to it as strongly as JamesonCourage has, I can see why someone might react in that way.
I think there is another dynamic going on related to these issues of transparency and "dumbing down", which Ron Edwards gets at in
this passage:
A lot of game texts in this [simulationist] tradition reach for a fascinating ideal: that reading the book is actually the start of play, moving seamlessly into group play via character creation. Features of some texts like the NPC-to-PC explanatory style and GM-only sections are consistent with this ideal, as well as the otherwise-puzzling statement that character generation is a form of Director stance. It supports the central point of this essay, that the value of Simulationist play is prioritizing the group imaginative experience, to an extent that expands the very notion of "play" into acts that from Narrativist or Gamist perspectives are not play at all. . .
The GM problem, only partly solved by GM-only sections, is that it makes it very hard to write a coherent how-to explanation for scenario preparation and implementation. Putting this sort of information right out "in front of God and everybody" is counter-intuitive for some Simulationist-design authors, because it's getting behind the curtain at the metagame level. The experience of play, according to the basic goal, is supposed to minimize metagame, but preparation for play, from the GM's perspective, is necessarily metagame-heavy, and if reading the book is assumed to be actually beginning to play ... well, then a certain conflict of interest sets into the process.
The usual textual solution is to assume that the GM is already on the same page and to address him or her as a co-conspirator.
Transparent character creation and encounter design rules,
let alone transparent action resolution rules like 4e's power system, violate the simulationist canon that the metagame must be invisible when not completely absent. And I think this is what a lot of the hostility to 4e and its transparency is motivated by.
You also see it in descriptions of the rules as "textbooks" or as not being "good reads" - which seem to imply that a manual for playing a game
should itself produce an aesthetic experience comparable to playing the game.
First, D&D doesn't historically (to my knowledge) say that it's a completely balanced game, and that everyone will contribute just as much during gameplay.
B/X, in talking about balance, are mostly concerned with the balance between risk and reward and the rate of PC advancement, rather than with balance across participants (see some quotes in
this post).
But AD&D makes it fairly clear that there is intended to be a degree of balance between classes, although MUs will - by design- be weakest at low levels and strongest at high levels. Racial abilities and level limits are also talked about in terms of balance.
