True!
It would be much more accurate to say that "4e largely did away with MAD in PHB 2 and 3"
PHB1 has several MAD classes - Starlocks and Paladins being the worst offenders. Heck; if you're restricted to PHB1, any V-shaped class gets hit a bit. Fighters have a bit of MAD, too, needing Strength, Wisdom, and a variable 3rd stat depending on which weapon they're using.
-O
Fighters don't need Wisdom. A Wisdom of 10 will do, 12 if the player wants to have a slight boost to Combat Superiority.
Just because class feature, powers, and feat options are available does not mean that a PC has to be good in all of them. I played a Staff Wizard with a Con of 12 and Wis of 12 who never used his Staff immediate interrupt in 5 levels of play and had Cloud of Daggers and Thunderwave, only doing the 1 point of damage and pushing a foe one square respectively.
I actually consider the A shape PC classes of PHB2 and later to be a weakness of the game system. Instead of people having to make tough ability score decisions as to what they want their PC to do and hence, not every PC is a cookie cutter copy of many others of that class, now a lot of them look similar abliity score-wise.
WotC dummied down the game system. Feats in PHB1 required a player to think ahead of time because of ability score requirements. That has, for the most part, vanished from the game system and I think it's a shame.
Now, most players can get whatever cool class feats that they want for their PC, straight off the optimization boards from the splat books. Even feat chains, for the most part, have gone the way of the dinosaur which I think is a watering down of the system, not a beefing up.
It's probably an issue of increasing the game base size and designing for the least common denominator of player skill and desire to research feats and powers.