I think
@Hussar has a good take on this. A lot of it is in the presentation. I think the launch was inelegant and WotC did nothing to help folks move into 4E. In fact, it seemed like they did quite a bit to shell shock folks.
We've talked about the several factors which added up to a flawed sales pitch and a less receptive audience. Including edition/book churn fatigue. Launching a whole new edition after players were already drowning in books from 3rd and 3.5, having had an unusually short edition turnover between those two editions and then another short few years to 4th (2000, 2003, 2008, compared with 10 years between 1E and 2E, and 11 years between 2E and 3E). As Snarf and others have talked about earlier, the 2E to 3E transition in particular was welcome because AD&D was moribund, so that new edition, despite being arguably an equally radical revamp, was viewed as a new lease on life for D&D.
Which brings us back to the OP, and the point of this thread. 4e was the fastest edition to be abandoned. As I've noted previously, it was already dead within Hasbro prior to the release of Essentials ... which means that it was dead within two years of its release. We don't know the exact trend lines, but I would suspect, based on that information, that the trend lines were not good; that a number of people that originally purchased 4e chose not to continue playing it. Obviously, while this is trivially true (there are some number of people for whom this is true), without knowing the actual numbers, we can't know how much of a factor this was.
Ja. And/or that folks who WERE playing it weren't continuing to buy books, just using their Insider/Character Builder subscriptions to enable play, with maybe the DM & other similarly enthusiastic players with sufficient disposable income continuing to bother buying actual books.
Re: the "fastest edition to be abandoned", depending on how we define that, I might quibble that 3rd was about the same or even shorter. Given that 3.5 relaunched the entire D&D line in three years rather than the six between 4e and 5e. Although insiders like Rick Marshall have explained that 3.5 was expected/planned to be a thing even before 3rd was released, they've confirmed that it was a significantly more extensive revamp than originally envisioned. Rather than a minor update it wound up being on the scale of the OD&D + supplements to 1E, or 1E to 2E edition changes. Even more extensive in some ways.
I would say it's more like ordering fries expecting Standard Cut and getting Steak Cut instead. 4e was still DnD. Every edition makes change. 3e moved away from thaco and made major change to how multiclass works, but it was still very much DnD.
I fully understand that 4e made changes that a lot of players hated, or thought that they were too much, but at the end of the day, it was very much still DnD, just like any edition before it (or after). It has a lot more in common with prior edition than it has opposite.
PS I know you were expending on Justice metaphor so I don't think you believe 4e was not DnD.
Yes, I think some of this is perspective, too. As folks have discussed, just the name D&D has some legacy expectations, and for a player who plays only or primarily D&D, the differences are magnified. For folks who play multiple different RPGs, the similarities loom larger.
I suspect that Hasbro corporate factors were indeed a significant factor in HOW different 4E is. The Core Brands funding directive pushing WotC to try to do something radical and ambitious with the new edition and tap into recurring subscription sales and tie it to a VTT. The desire to escape from the OGL and impose the more restrictive GSL so they could recapture the supplementary publishing the third party market was doing, or make more money off it by licensing.
Ironically, the missteps made in pursuit of Hasbro's profit and control targets/goals seem to have sabotaged the edition's commercial success. Though they seem to have pushed it into being a more ambitious design and more interesting game than it otherwise would or could have been.
