I don’t think this is true. When 5e was announced, 4e fans weren’t the most likely to give it a chance.
Fans of 4e were necessarily drawn from the segment of the fan base most willing to give a new ed a fair shot. You had to be, to look past the rocky introduction and the vitriol of the edition war, and form an honest impression of the new ed.
5e's introduction was a lot more considerate and measured, there may not have been a lot of enthusiasm for Next, but when season 19 rolled around, we played HotDQ....
...and remembering what a mess KotSf was, didn't hold it against 5e, either.
They were pretty upset about it, with a daily post about how WotC forsaken them and treated them like garbage by having a new edition. Many posters even said they would do their best to sabotage the game (don’t ask me how that was to be done).
Yeah, no.
Where's the edition war?
Where's the 4e clone?
There's been some disappointment registered, there's been surprisingly patient calls for the return if 4e options cut from the 5e PH (warlord!), there are surely a few tables here and there running 4e instead of 5e rather than as well as it.
But no 5e books are being burned, no new terminologies invented, no misinformation spread, no sabotage.
Those reactions of course made all the rest of us who were fans of prior editions all roll our eyes because 4e fans were now experiencing the same thing all the rest of us did when our edition was discontinued.
Not quite the same, no. For one thing we have the lessons of the edition war to learn from.
For another fans of 4e weren't just more inclined to adopt a new edition, they have no SRD or clone to defect to.
OSR and PF meant that fans of older eds could have live-and-let live, their own preferences being wll-supported, but, they committed enthusiastically to fighting the edition war (and, really, still are - thus the freak-out over 4e doing somewhat well in this very small-sample, self-selected poll).
Well except maybe for 2e, there was never a clone specifically of 2e. Hackmaster was more 1e,as was OSR, which also covered 0e and B/X(ECMI).
So, yeah, maybe it's not surprising, just on a practical level, that 4e and 2e fans seem a little over-represented on a 5e forum.
Also, 5e was able to bring a lot of the OSR crowd back in (and not just 2e). .
A lot, yes, but clearly not all, as OSR and PF have hardly vanished. So with 1e/0e/BECMI and 3.x fans having other options pulling them away from 5e, and the 5e forum, there a tad under-represented in this one, teeny, unscientific poll.
Why is that so upsetting?