Remathilis
Legend
What do you mean why do I ever buy a new edition? There are fairly obvious reasons. I mean lets consider this at its extreme, the first rules I owned were the LBBs (Original D&D as some call it now). Of course I could have stuck with playing that, but it is a rather primitive game. It has its charm and its advantages, but 1e was a much more usable set of rules, and we all naturally bought at least some 2e stuff over the years. I will note however that I personally never did run 3e or 3.5e and don't own that material. I'm happy to play it, but note that AD&D remained perfectly adequate to many people. I don't have a really strong ideological reason for that either.
OTOH I found that 4e worked well, the material was useful, the rules were practical and covered the things that I wanted, so I bought it. My 2e books were pretty shot anyway, and we hadn't played in a while, so it seemed like a reasonably point to go try out something newer. As I say, not being hung up with one specific set of mechanics or fluff being somehow "more D&D" than another there was no ideological problem there.
I don't have to accept or not accept other people's tastes. I know when I say that I don't understand their tastes that this tends to translate to "I don't approve and think they should adopt my tastes" but I'm not saying that. Ramathilis need not justify his preferences to me. He will have to live with the fact that I don't understand how his brain works and for me the differences in fluff and mechanics between editions are not a pressing issue. I am running the same campaign world I invented for my Holmes Basic campaign in 1976 or so with 4e. It works fine. It feels like mostly the same world, and there are NPCs in it that were characters played back in that 1976 game. They actually translate reasonably well, at least in concept (and the concepts we were playing with back then were pretty basic).
Here is my position.
I began in Basic D&D, moved onto AD&D 2e, then 3e and 3.5. Each game felt like an evolution, but they kept the same kernel. For example, the wizard spells per day chart is pretty much the same in each edition (if not perfect, its moderately close). A 5th level mage casts fireball, which does enough damage to wipe out a room of goblins. That is an outcome in Basic, AD&D, and 3e, but its not in 4e. Its not even a bug; its a feature. Its an intended outcome that a fireball can't kill a room of goblins, it won't even do much more than bloody them (if even). That bother's me. It doesn't feel like the D&D I've played up to this point.
Fourth did that to me alot. It didn't feel like an evolution of the original rules, it felt like someone trying to capture a similar feeling using new rules. The more I tried to make it feel like what D&D meant to me, the less it worked. Ironically, the more I strayed from those tropes, the more palatable it became. (The best 4e game we played involved a genasi swordmage, a deva invoker, a warforged warlord, a dragonborn sorcerer, and a human starlock facing a shadar-kai invasion. Hardly the Tolkien-esque fantasy of the Redbox).
Was it the mechanics? Somewhat. The power-based resources and healing surge-based recovery certainly felt different than classic D&D of old. Was it the story? Somewhat. 4e certainly felt like it went out of the way to redefine as much as possible; both in the sense of creating a "new" experience as much as it was to separate it from the boatload of IP given away free in the 3e SRD. Yet somehow, the two mixed together constantly to remind me it wasn't the same game. It didn't look the same, play the same, or even read the same. It had similarities (similar races and classes) but they were all presented in such different ways as to always remind me this was different. In the end, I couldn't look past the mountain of different to fine the common ground.
I often feel that was WotC's point. They didn't want to look, feel, or play like older D&D. They wanted a new beast with a familiar name. In the end, most of the "legacy" elements felt forced, far different from its origin except in the most general sense. They thought they could build a newer, sleeker game that would appeal to card-gamers, wargamers, RPG-players video-gamers and MMO-players that just happened to have the pedigree of the Worlds Oldest RPG tacked on.
I understand there are plenty who disagree and I'm not here to say you're wrong. I just point out that little trivial things add up. Even something as simple as "elementals are stupid, hail archons!" felt like a slap in the face. For me, 4e was best when it wasn't trying to be the D&D of my youth; when it tried to be it just felt wrong.