I feel your argument is that with enough work you CAN pound a round peg in a square hole. That's true.
I think that's a little pejorative. My argument is that, if you know how to run skill challenges (by reading the rulebooks for the games that invented them - the 4e rulebooks on their own aren't enough) then you can run noncombat encounters in 4e that are compelling in both mechanical and narrative terms.
What you call "pounding a round peg in a square hole" I call "playing the game as it is designed - ie with full recognition and deployment of its metagame mechanics - rather than playing it as if it were AD&D or 3E".
It isn't the kind of game that is possible with 4E, but that it isn't the best choice for a large number of former D&D players. If 4E was awesome at running these types of games, Pathfinder wouldn't still exist. If so many people complain of it, mighn't there be a little truth behind it.
I think that most PF players don't want to run a game like 4e. That's pretty obvious. But as I posted upthread, I think that is because they object to metagame-heavy mechanics, of which skill challenges are one obvious example (the GM has to metagame the narration of successful and failed checks so as to drive the situation forward - the outcome of checks can't be treated in the same way that is it in 3E or PF as a simple matter of "meeting a DC correlates to a particular event occurring in the fiction").
But if you are asking, Do I think that 4e is an awesome system for running a situation-driven, thematically compelling (if rather gonzo) game of fantasy adventure?, then yes - for those who are happy to use metagame mechanics to produce that result.
Give me the character and story feel of 3E, give me the dynamic combats of 4E.
My own view is that it is hard to get dynamic combats out of a game that uses only simulationinst mechanics.
Ron Edwards comments on a similar issue
here, under the heading "Ouija board roleplaying":
How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment, someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own power.
Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. Typically, groups who play this way have been together for a very long time.
My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way? Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily.
As is usual for Edwards, this is a little on the pessimistic side, and slightly dramatised for rhetorical effect. But I tend to think the basic point is right. 4e gets dynamic combats because it gives players the power to direct the combat by deploying mechanics that don't necessarily correlate to actions their PCs are taking in the fictional world. Take away those mechanics, and it becomes harder to get the dynamic combat.
