Suppose you are happy with the game of D&D at some earlier state - whether you liked OD&D, AD&D, 3rd, or 3.5. Now, the designers of the game say that they are going to take the game in a new direction which is very different from your preferred rules, style, and content. You are at that point in a lose/lose situation.
Either the new edition (4th) will be very badly done, in which case, the posts which are suggesting how badly the new edition will suck are perfectly justified because everyone loses, or else the new edition (4th) will be well done, in which case, most players will move from your preferred edition/play style towards that imposed by the new edition and will acquire the resulting expectations of play. In this case, the people who enjoy the new ediiton 'win' (in that they get something that makes them happy), but you still lose since your potential player base as well as external support (published materials) contracts.
As I've said many times before, the thing I liked about 3.0 was that it was very much like a much cleaner better done version of my own house rules for 1st edition AD&D. When 3rd came out, I was playing GURPS because of my distaste for the problems with 1st edition and its limitations, and my frustration with the amount of work required to fix the problems. Third edition got me back, because it was very much the direction I had wanted to go with AD&D but simply hadn't the time or the insight as a designer to accomplish (too many patches, not enough rebuilding from the ground up.) It was easy to sell me on 3rd edition because every snippet I heard or read was like someone had read my mind and then given me what I had wanted.
The snippets I hear from 4th edition are not like that. Instead of converging with the direction that I wanted to go in from 3rd edition, the game has diverged from where I wanted to go. So, it was harder to sell me on 3.X because the designers moved the game in a different direction than I wanted. It's like buying a chocolate sundae and thinking that the problem is that it needs more nuts and a caramel drizzel, and the guy who makes the sunday thinking that the problem is that it needs bannanas and lots of whipped cream. Both are valid choices, but the point is that not only is my sundae not getting better (from my perspective) but its being taken off the menu. This is the reason I transitioned from 1st edition to 3rd edition (with GW/Chill 2nd edition/GURPS/WE Star Wars etc. in the middle). Second edition took the game in a direction I didn't want to go. (More like the designer thinking that my chocalate sundae would be better off without the chocalate sauce.)
I'm not going to write a long post bashing all the problems I see with 4th edition, especially not sight unseen. I'm just saying that 4th edition seems alot like 'badwrongfun' from what I'm hearing, in that someone might find it fun, but it probably won't be me. I'll just find it bad and wrong and play something else. I see it as 2nd edition all over again. Granted, they are making a different set of mistakes, but they are still getting away from the core game elements that made D&D successful in the first place. The reason I will still likely prefer 3.0 to 4th (or 3.5) is that 3.0 stays true to the core game elements while improving the mechanics. I didn't see that in 3.5, and I don't anticipate that in 4th. From what I gather so far, the content is moving away from the direction I like and the core game is going to be moving sufficiently away from D&D that for any game of style of play that I'd want to do like it, I'd probably move to a different game system entirely.
