I'll answer the questions to the best of my ability, but remember that part of this just comes from personal play experiences and whatnot. Really, I can summarize it thusly - while 4e seems to have more options and capacity than other editions, that capacity is actually diminished in real play.
This has been my experience; I fully accept that it may not be yours, and I'm not in the business of making blanket statements.
That being said, to answer some questiosn!
I don't get this.
Not only is there nothing stopping you from doing this, 4e encourages off the wall stunts far more then any previous edition. The emphasis on interesting terrain in fights and the presence of Page 42 means you have more support then ever before to be creative with things.
Yes. Except, as I'm sure you've heard, page 42 is kind of a flawed example, because many of those rules basically encourage PCs NOT to use them. Or, rather, they are a great resource, but the game really rewards encounter power usage more, because those powers usually have better effects (and even if they don't, players are more likely to use them because they know the results of the power, and may have feats + magical items that heighten those powers' effects).
While terrain powers are GREAT, and I fully support them, an unfortunate side effect is that sometimes GMs tend to disregard terrain that doesn't have terrain powers written for them. Also, an unfortunate side effect I've seen is players not wanting to use terrain effects that they know were put there by the GM, because those powers often feel contrived and "balanced", and would rather use their own encounter powers.
Not to mention, in older editions, it was the very vagueness of the terrain that encouraged players to think outside the box. there was a bit more negotiation between players and GMs (again, in my own experience, I'm sure other experiences will conflict). However, with pre-written powers, that negotiation can slip - the game becomes a matter of the GM staying on his side of the screen, and the players staying on theirs.
How is endlessly just saying "I full attack" any different?
In some ways, it's not. But in others, it's a huge difference. Because player's DON'T endlessly say "I attack" all the time. Sometimes, they describe their powers in glorious detail. Or at the very least, they're visualizing their attacks in different ways.
A player could say "I attack" fifty times in a session, and in his head, each attack could be something else. In real play, this is probably not the case - he might visualize a few sword slices, or have some vague idea of attacks.
My problem is, if in a 4e game the PCs get in three fights, in each fight, when the fighter says "I use Come and Get It", he is visualizing that in the exact same way. Because that power is a named attack, and one that in most players' logical minds would repeat in a similar way. So, every encounter, he uses that power, and it looks exactly the same in his mind's eye.
So, while "I attack" might seem much more boring mechanically, in the minds of players, that doesn't necessarily translate.
So many of the complaints about 4e that I see, apply just as much if not more so to previous editions.
This may or may not be true. Sometimes, an edition change highlights problems that never seemed as big in older editions. I never heard a complaint about
sleep until 3rd edition came out, when it was actually nerfed in comparison to older editions. And yet, sleep has always been a very important spell in D&D. Ditto for (low-level) undead - undead were never considered "weak" monsters in my group of friends until 3rd edition came out... and then we played BECMI and the undead were easily the less threatening monsters out there (unless we count the few that have level drain).
However, just because we may be able to see traces of those complaints in past editions... it doesn't mean they don't exist in the new edition. Quite often, it's changes in the new edition that are highlighting these problems we never saw in earlier editions.
We didn't care much about sleep because wizards didn't have too many spells. Suddenly, wizards get more spells at the start of the game, and sleep becomes a game-changer, even though it's actually been weakened. And no one complained about undead being weak in earlier games because players were oftne more in the dark about the monsters' mechanics... but in 3e, where they could see some of the mechanics of the monster during play, the easiness involved in killing low-level undead became readily apparent.
