What are you looking for from the game, then?
Because what you describe is precisely how I felt about 3e, and is more or less how I feel about 5e (it's a bit different but still similar). 4e was the exact opposite. It was finally a game actually doing the things I'd always wanted. Of course, I spent the first like year or two of 4e's run being a hater because that's what I was taught to be by a former friend that had never even read it. Once I actually saw it in action, though, I was hooked. D&D was finally actually a cooperative, team game. It was a game that took game design seriously, as opposed to acting like game design is a silly irrelevance or something you can literally put almost zero effort into because you can just double the GM's workload instead. And it offered thematic things I'd been hungering for for decades, like a "proud warrior race" that wasn't ugly, stupid, nor evil.
So...what do YOU want from D&D? What do you yearn for, in your heart of hearts? Really drill down and go deep. This is a difficult question; please don't answer lightly or casually. I emphasize this because I never figured half this stuff out without being exposed to other approaches. I thought, for at least 7 years, that I knew exactly what I wanted and that 3e was giving me like 95% of it. That, as you say, all I needed was just the right combo of house rules or the right ACFs or a killer setting concept and I'd have the game I always longed to play but couldn't quite find. 4e showed me that 3e, fundamentally, at almost the very core of the system, not only didn't but couldn't do what I wanted. 3e is incapable of being the team-based game where story and rules form a united, consistent front. Even the very very best of retooled rules (specifically, DSP's Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might come to mind) simply patch the gaping maw of the horrible, horrible design faults in 3e, making a system that is as far as I can tell quite well-balanced, but totally devoid of the teamwork incentive that I desire.
