I would argue that that is not quite true, with an illustrative example: Marking. Marking cannot be adjudicated by a computer nor a flowchart. It is not autonomous. It requires a values-judgment. It is genuinely indispensable to have a human mind deciding what is worth doing, and what is worth avoiding.
This is still 4e striving to eliminate DM adjudication. It is the player who decides who to Mark within the parameters of the Mark rules. The DM doesnt vaguely adjudicate whether a target is Markable or not. That seems the 4e ideal anyway.
Specifically, 4e worked very hard (as I know you know) to remove balance concerns. It did not eliminate them...but they got farther than I'd ever have expected.
4e achieved game engine balance so well, even the tiniest differences in math were detectable, and all well within the need for balance during normal play. People were amazed that mathematical balance was even possible, heh, and tended to obsess about it to minutia.
By eliminating the need for the GM to worry much about balance, their goal was for the GM to pick up all of that cognitive load and shunt it right back into all of the other--and let's face it, much more fun--parts of being a GM.
I agree. 4e deserves its reputation for being the best edition D&D to DM. By making the rules clear and the players largely responsible for them, the DM focused on story.
4e is, by far, the most flavorful and narratively versatile edition of D&D.
That said. The 4e rules mostly required minis on a grid, and stopped short of embracing theater of the mind (tho there were workarounds). The 4e stories tended toward combat, albeit in a flavorful way.
Throw together a wild and raucous fight, is it still +/- 4 levels of the characters? Then it'll most likely be a fun and engaging time. And all the time you would've spent worrying about balance, you can instead spend on the zillion other things that a GM needs to be paying attention to.
Yes.
Of course, that's not how folks saw it...but perception and reality are not as closely allied as any of us would like, I suspect.
When 4e arrived, many players were accustomed to the chaos of many different 3e mechanical systems. 3e was designer guesstimations. Convoluted mechanics would require gaining useless features to qualify for a gaining powerful feature, making both broken overpowered and broken underpowered impossible to fix. All of this 3e ignorance about how a game engine ecosystem worked, made balancing impossible and even produced the theoretical Pun-Pun.
But players were still habituated to convoluted mechanics and multiple systems achieving the same thing.
On this you will never hear argument from me. Attempting to kill the OGL was the single stupidest thing 4e's creators ever did. Had they not done so--had they instead collaborated and tried to reinforce the OGL--a great many things would have gone differently.
WotC decided to kill OGL even before 4e was published. At the time, I and a few others predicted correctly that 4e would fail because of the lack of OGL. It was painful to be right.
I'm....not really sure what "dependent on the official products" means in this context. That makes it hard to respond to your thought here, but I feel like if we can get to that, this is a fruitful discussion to have.
Generally, 4e DMs would rely on Dragon Magazine products and new official splatbooks, while finding it difficult to homebrew mechanics for the special needs of their own settings. The publication of the 4e official products was at a very rapid pace, but much of it was niche, thus less profitable.
Given it's been nearly 20 years since 4e came out, I'm pretty sure we'd be playing 5e by now. But it would've been a 5e launched much more recently. But I do agree that keeping the OGL and letting 4e cook for like one extra year? Massive, massive differences.
4e could have been evergreen, but like 5e, would have 4e 2007, 4e 2010 (Essentials), 4e 2014, 4e 2024, ... if it had OGL to keep it alive. The engine would have evolved over time. Its main needs were to make the advancement schedule more flexible, understand what D&D players wanted, and most of all have an OGL to allow indies to experiment and fill in niches. All of this was doable.
Personally, I don't think 5e kept any amount of "balancing player options" from 4e. Like I personally think it actively went out of its way to piss on balancing player options, and 5.5e came about in part because players were unhappy that they did that. (It came out for a lot of reasons, this was just one of them IMO.)
5e was aware of 4e game balance (many of the same designers, including Mearls). The 5e balance was mainly by a robust game engine. 5e is surprisingly difficult to break, and can handle alot of mechanical tweaking, which invites DMs to make it their own for their homebrew settings.
5e heavily courted the lost 3e fans, and often threw 4e fans under the bus (such as no Warlord). But many 4e-isms did continue under the 5e surface, such as nonphysical hit points, and hit dice, even if active avoiding 4e terms like "Bloodied". Also monster statblocks rules differ in kind from character sheet rules. 4e is an innovative and well designed system. Today the edition warring has relaxed, and most players are comfortable with importing the best 4e ideas into 5e.
The breakthru of 5e was the unprecedented surveys to understand what D&D players wanted.
Today the surveys seem to want to know how to least rock the boat. But when a decisive majority does want a certain change, the surveys can still help.
