Like some other posters who have responded to this, I think your reference to "DM expansion" is a mischaracterisation. In contrast to AD&D, and to 3E and 5e as best I understand them, 4e takes it as a premise that manipulating magical effects - including rituals - is something that can be done via an action declaration resolved by way of a skill check. There are innumerable published examples of this, mostly in relation to various sorts of skill challenges and traps/hazards but also (as per the Speak with Dead example) rituals.
I posted a simple example above, and I'll elaborate on it slightly. In AD&D, there is no canonical way of resolving the following action declaration:
I say a prayer to the Raen Queen to weaken the undead before me, other than via the Turn Undead mechanics. And only clerics and level 3+ paladins have access to those mechanics.
In 4e, there is a canonical way of resolving that action declaration: it's set out on p 42, and I quoted some of it earlier. The worked example on p 42 is an attack + push attack, analogous to a standard rogue or fighter attack power. But the prayer can equally be resolved the same way, analogous to the Turn Undead or similar anti-undead encounter attack powers.
When it comes to out-of-combat actions, like modifying portals, the analogues are not published attack powers but published examples of out-of-combat resolution, such as examples of skill challenges, traps and hazards.
@Garthanos has posted suggesting that it would have been helpful for some of those examples to be printed in a more player-facing format. And that's probably true. But that's a matter of presentation and publicatoin strategy - it doesn't affect the question of what the rules of the system actually provide for.
Characters have the abiity, in the fiction, to try and manipulate magical effects. This is exemplified by all the published examples of traps, hazards and skill challenges that contemplate such manipulation taking place, and being resolved typically by way of an Arcana check. Here's an example from the DMG, p 93:
Symbol of Suffering
Trap: Anyone familiar with magic recognises the symbol as a powerful ward against approach . . .
Countermeasures: An adjacent character can disable the trap with a DC 36 Thievery check or a DC 32 Arcana check.
And here's one from the DMG 2, p 90:
Opening the Ninth Ward
To reach the vilains sanctuary or the repository of a might artefact deep in a dungeon, the characters must bypass a powerfu magical ward that binds the doors. . . .
Arcana (moderate DC by level, 10 minutes): A character can use Arcana to sense the presenc of magic and identify the nature of the ward. Additional successes indicate a breaking of the ward through arcane means.
Rendering a portal two-way that is, by default, one-way, is an example of manipulating a magical effect. It's the GM's job to establish the resolution framework (eg single skill check, or skill challenge) and adjudicate that. The DMG and DMG 2 reiterate that the GM should be saying "yes" to this sort of thing - ie facilitating it by establishing an appropriate adjudication framework, using the examples provided as guidelines - rather than shutting it down.
I don't know enough about 5e to comment on whether it adopts a similar approach. I know that AD&D does not, and I don't believe that 3E does either.
As someone (I think
@doctorbadwolf) already posted upthread, skill challenges are the resolution framework for resolving "strategic" actions. So the strategic-layer abilities that players have are those player-side resources that feed into skill challenges. As I already posted, skills and rituals are the primary resources here; powers, action points, hp/healing surges and gp are secondary resources.
So you can't know what strategic layer abilities a 4e mage (for instance) has until you know what are the feasiable action declarations for the player of that mage in an appropriately framed skill challenge. Naturally this is going to vary from table to table, hence why 4e is (in this respect) more like Fate or Cortex+ Heroic and less like 3E, Rolemaster or (perhaps?) 5e.
The features of 4e that are being identified as "samey" - symmetrical resource suites with common recharge times across all the various PC builds - are crucial to facilitating this. For instance, the DMG 2 can coherently say (I'm now paraphrasing pp 85-86)
spending an encounter power in a skill challenge is equivalent to succeeding at a secondary skill check (eg give a bonus to another check or open up the use of another skill). This is the principle that underpins the example I posted upthread, where the bard uses his magical mastery of song to counteract the cries of the trapped demon (mechanically, spends a song-related encounter power to open up Diplomacy as a skill to use in the challenge).
You can't state or apply such a principle in a system that doesn't have a robust and shared framework of PC abilities. (Hence why some 4e players are a bit antsy about psionics and even moreso about Essentials PCs - they don't interact in a clear fashion with the resource economy of the game.)