I wouldn’t go that far. More like he really likes 4e and it’s design.
Yeah, he comes at his comments purely from a designer point of view, rather than a regular player. As a regular player and DM he enjoys running 5E fine and his company is producing content for 5E, which he is happy about. But when he puts on his designer hat, he talks about what 5E is missing now that 4E used to have.
For instance... when it comes to combat, the "tactical" aspects of monster design he feels is missing because very little in most monster's stat blocks can be used "tactically" (and instead had what he called "big bags of hit points".) Which isn't really new... I mean people this entire time have been making the same point.
The example he gave in his very last stream when he went deeper into it was the Giants. He said designing an encounter using 5E giants wasn't interesting, because the only things they had in their statblock were a melee and a ranged attack, and a few had some typical spells. That's it. Unlike say in 4E, there were no abilities that any giant had to move enemies around the battlefield, slow enemies down, cause ongoing damage, mark enemies, attack every enemy around the giant at once, etc. Pretty much all the hallmarks of 4E miniatures combat design the giants had in some form or fashion. So as a tactical miniatures combat game... creating encounters using 4E was more interesting, and he while playing it had more decisions on how it played-- using strictly the statblocks provided by the game's design.
Now that being said... again, this is him wearing a designer hat. Because many of us as players of the game would probably suggest you can do a lot of this in 5E using improvised actions, or just making comments during combat saying things like "If I shove this goblin, can I push him so hard he goes tumbling into the firepit?" And the DM might think about it for a second, make a Rule of Cool in the spur of the moment, and then go "Sure! Try it!" And then the results would play out. And in fact, as a 5E DM, this is pretty much how Colville runs the game as well. But none of that stuff is intrinsic in the design of specific aspects of the game (or at least placed in obvious position). I mean, anyone can try to shove someone back 5 feet... but that's not emblazoned on anyone's character sheet as a standard tactic you can apply-- you have to remember you can replace one of your attacks with a Shove. Whereas in 4E there will be many PC options where 'Push 1 Square' is right front and center as an At-Will maneuver. And that's just one of the numerous other "powers" that PCs and monsters will have written down in their character sheets and statblocks for everyone to see and remember and use right off the bat.
So from a design point-of-view, for a player coming in with no expectations of how D&D plays or is meant to run or what can be done... I understand where Matt's coming from. You look at a Fire Giant in 5E, the giant can swing a greatsword (maybe twice), and throw a rock-- both for just damage. Whereas the 4E Fire Giant can swing a greatsword that marks the target and pushes them 2 squares away, can hurl lava which can immobilize the target and cause it to fall from the sky if the target is flying, and can send out a wave of heat to every target around them out to 5 squares that will burn then and catch them on fire causing them to keep burning every round until they save. You look at those two statblocks, and yeah, the 4E version has more tactical options built into the statblock itself. The 5E fire giant
might be able to do things along those lines using a number of the other options and rules found all across various parts of the game (shoving, grappling, disarming, spells that mimic the abilities of the 4E giant)... but the DM has to go out of their way to find, attach and build those things into the giant statlock, rather than having them already written in place.
But we who are players of D&D and who have had years of experience knowing we can just make up and improvise all manner of goofy crap during a fight... can create an experience like you might find in 4E combat, without actually needing it written down. And in fact, oftentimes more outrageous stuff can happen, because we aren't beholden to the three or four specific "tactical" actions on the statblock. And this is where I think many people bounce off of 4E... because as has been said many times before, if you write down several specific things a character or monster can do... you don't tend to look outside of it for
other things to do. So the 4E monster ends up feeling like it has "less" options because we stick only with the several options written in the stablock and don't improvise
more than that. In 5E we HAVE to improvise more stuff and thus our options become much wider.
But none of that is built into the design. It's all imagination and improvisation-- something from a designer's POV is way too esoteric to make "rules" for that you can put in a D&D book for all skill level of player to figure out and play out of the gate.
