True, they weren't - there's a lot of forces at work in a market (though, with a cult/nerd property like D&D, a little nerdrage goes a long way) - changing the rules was a response to the dislike of a sub-set of people.
Those rules, were, themselves, based on a relatively small, self-selecting sub-set of people making criticisms of 3.x - "static combat" for instance. And, not entirely irrelevant to this topic, the proliferation of Fighter SUX threads back on Gleemax just might've had something to do with the huge expansion of choice/power that martial classes got in 4e. And, the contrary nerdrage of the edition war, to taking all that away again and powering casters back up. None of those were vast majorities of anything getting a consensus, they were small, vocal, elements.
So you're whistling past the graveyard, a bit. You know the game has changed in response to relatively small, very vocal, sub-sets of the fanbase, before. The last time, it changed in a way you liked.
The next time, who knows?
(Personally, I suspect D&D has finally settled into a 'sustaining' mode as far as rules go. Future editions will have different themes and different art and the like, but the rules aren't going to see substantive changes again. Like ever. That ship has sailed, hit a mine, burned to the waterline, sunk to the bottom of a deep-sea trench, been buried in a avalanche, and is currently riding a subduction zone very slowly into the upper mantle of the planet.)
(Then again, I've been wrong every time I've made a prediction about the future of D&D.)
