Fairly civil, yes. Though I don't think anyone has really pointed out the negative connotation carried by the term "bandwagon."
Well, now you have. It's not much of a negative connotation, frankly. I'd be more inclined to call it an "unfortunate choice of words," and even that's giving it more weight than it really deserves IMO.
The fact that the thread went on for 20 pages before anyone expressed a problem with the title - despite plenty of 4E enthusiasts posting - suggests that most folks either didn't have a problem with it, or didn't have enough of a problem to bring it up. For those who do, I suggest pretending the thread title was "Having problems with 4E" and letting it go at that. The OP was clearly not intending to denigrate the 4E community, rather expressing his own growing disillusionment with certain aspects of the system.
The analogies, Captain... they canno' take much more o' this!
Nice. You'd get XP if I didn't have to spread it around.
As regards the balance/creativity trade-off, I've been pondering this lately. I do agree that 4E has limited the scope of creativity in combat, largely by trying to eliminate any possibility of taking out an enemy without slogging through that enemy's hit points. And in that sense, "balance" is indeed the enemy of creativity, since hit point and damage ratios are a core element of 4E's brand of balance.
But there are other possibilities for balance. Instead of trying to force everything into a mathematical model of hit points to damage, the goal could be to provide PCs with an array of flexible, general-purpose tools both in and out of combat, and balance them (in a much more intuitive and less mathematical sense) by distributing them as evenly as possible, so that each class has a toolbox of roughly comparable size.
This does run into the problem that magic is expected to do extraordinary things. Casters legitimately expect to have tools to which non-casters do not have access. There are ways to deal with that issue, though; by giving magic costs that non-casters don't have to pay (e.g., ritual components), or by arguing that casters must specialize in magic to an extent that precludes learning advanced non-combat tricks and skills, so non-casters get tools to which casters do not have access as well as vice versa.