Here I'm going to disagree hard with you because you are under the mistaken impression that player sided vs DM sided is a zero sum game.
I... what? Certainly not. I mean, I used "more player sided" and not "player sided entirely." I expressly made my comparisons relative, not absolute.
3.X is player sided and anti-DM. This is because 3.X RAW tells the DM to use the same rules the players do. A good example here is feats. Being able to browse through the rulebook and pick two or three feats to add colour and mechanics is superb for many players. On the other hand having to pick two or three feats out of the 1500 or so available for every minor monster is tooth-grindingly fiddly and obnoxious. As is the hard coding of spells rather than doing what you want.
I don't necessarily disagree with you except that the direction to use the same rules in 3.x is just strongly implied, not absolute. I made the mistake of doing it that way, though, and ended up hating running 3.x by the end of it. Way too fiddly. There was zero chance I was going for follow into Pathfinder, which didn't fix any of the structural issues I had in 3.x. However, if you noted the implication and just ignored it, 3.x could work very well because there were really only a few things you needed to note in the encounter math that mattered and those could be done quite easily. That required a level of awareness I certainly lacked during my 3.x run, but I see it now. Still don't want to deal with the fiddly, though, so no risk of return for me.
4e is player sided and DM sided. There were slightly more feats available by the end of 4e than by 3.5 and far more customisation available. But a fundamental difference here is that 4e DMs are not told to follow the same rules as 4e players. The two roles are considered very different so what you do is different. As a DM in 4e I am actively significantly more empowered than I am in 5e; I can do whatever I like in both games - but I have better tools and fewer constraints to do it. If I want to be a game designer in 4e I can be - the only key difference is that the baseline is much higher so if my game design is crap it will stand out like a sore thumb.
This is exactly what I was saying -- 4e is as player-facing as 3.x, but fixed a lot of the fundamental issues in design that made it work better. Primary among those was asymmetric play across the screen. I wasn't explicit, but there's no disagreement here.
5e on the other hand isn't as player facing as 3.X - but it's less DM facing than oD&D, AD&D 1e, or 4e. If I want to run the game by the intended rules and just design my own monsters 4e is so vastly superior in its benchmarks it is silly. If I want to customise areas or create house rules there is no fundamental difference in doing so.
Now, here we disagree. 5e is much less player facing than 3.x. You have asymmetry across the screen and the core mechanic has shifted from rules adjudication to GM decides again. The GM is the engine that makes 5e run, using the rules when they need to, but the core play loop provides the GM the authority to just rule success or failure without ever engaging the rules -- and this holds across all pillars of play. There's a reason that 5e gets the "DM empowerment" mantra tossed at it as often as it does.
Now, it's worthwhile to note that 4e did a lot of things better, like monster/encounter design, no disagreement. That was, largely, due to the rules structure of 4e, though. I honestly think 4e did things as well as it did by accidental confluence of design rather than intent. I say this because the designers were sooooooooooo bad at expressing how the system works (it took, what, until Essentials until the got it pretty close?). They even contradicted that design in a few published adventures, reverting to a 3.x presentation instead of leaning into 4e's unique design. I will admit I had early trouble with 4e, and didn't really fully grok it myself until well into 5e, again partly because the designers sucked at explaining it and because it did things very different from older versions. Great game, love it, would play it in a heartbeat.
And if I want combat straight out of the books then in 5e I get bullet sponge enemies, minimised tactics, and a much less swingy game but with combats that are little different in length to other WotC editions.
Weird, I run mostly straight from the books and don't have that problem at all. Perhaps I'm bringing in my experience on what makes a good encounter -- variety -- and so never put down 12 orcs or whatever. It's 8 orcs, 2 orogs, and a Priest of Gruumsh, and I remember orcs carry javelins. The worst you can say about 5e here is that it doesn't explain good encounter design enough, not that the rules result in the above. They don't prevent it, but they don't cause it, either.
You still haven't explained why it is a good thing that the DM, in addition to running the world, running the NPCs, and playing the adversaries in combat is also supposed to be a game designer when they laid out probably $150 on a supposedly functional game. Some DMs like to be game designers but not all do. So those that don't like to but have all the other skills required are close to locked out.
I did, you didn't agree. Different things. The idea is to provide a toolset that the GM uses to build the game they want. All D&D is this, with different tropes or genres preferred by the rulesets. 4e was least flexible in this regard because it had high heroes with mystic powers built into it's ruleset -- you'd have to gut the system to remove that genre and it's associated tropes. 5e is more flexible because it doesn't build in as much, but that also makes it easier to fail because there aren't as many clear indications of what the system is supposed to do.
I mean, to answer your question a different way, why would anyone ever buy a model car, painstakingly build it, add aftermarket pieces, paint it and then sand and buff it to showroom shine when you can just buy a die-cast? People like building things. I like that, in 5e, I've run a Big Plot game (heavy central theme/mystery), a hexcrawl, and a Planescape troubleshooters game. Each has had very different feels and play with minimal houserules for each (I vary table rules to better match the feel of the game I want, but try not to alter much if any of the core ruleset so it's easy to get into it). I like the tinkering, and I don't mind having the flexibility to present a range of combats that don't have an expected build structure or format, like in 3.x or 4e. It's on me, and I like that.
And there is a good reason that every single 4e game I have played has at least 50% of the players ready, willing, and able to DM. 5e isn't in my experience quite back to the dark old days of 3.X where groups fell apart because no one would or could DM. But the load is higher on the DM and the tools are worse while the 4e DM has IME significantly more power because they can decide how spells will work rather than these being hard coded by the rules and with a pretty set paradigm.
Argument from anecdote is dangerous. I have more players who are willing to run 5e than 4e, with a large overlap of players. For instance, one of our GMs (since left the group) wouldn't run 4e but loved 5e. Another has run both (rocky both times), and I have two more right now that are thinking of running that didn't do that in 4e. That's not representative of anything but my tables, though, so I don't read much into it. D&D always puts a massive load on the DM. 4e took some off in some places, but added it in others, like being flexible to player introduce content. Other games have this as well, and share the load via it, but 4e it was usually a button press on the player side that required the GM to provide the actual changes. That's what stymied my at first -- adapting to a different cognitive load. Even when I had it down better (again, I didn't fully grok it until much later -- sorry, skill challenges, I love you now!), I didn't feel the load was less, just different. Also, a HUGE amount of the load in 4e was handled through the digital tools. If you played without those, holy crud but that system could crush you in options.
You say "strong vision story", I say "railroading". And flexibility is something we'll have to disagree on. But yes, I agree that if you want a linear story directed by The Storyteller and in which the stakes are defeat or victory then the post-Forge games like Fate Core, Apocalypse World, or Blades in the Dark aren't good. But when the stakes of combat are laid down in advance (as they are in this style of play) then the slow combat that lacks tactical depth because positioning is of minimal importance, and that lacks danger because hit points don't inspire death spirals does not help.
You can say that, but I disagree they're the same thing. You could get railroading, or you could get a strong set of themes and tropes that assist a plot. I ran one, my Big Plot game, where I had things fairly well structured in Act I so as to set the themes firmly, but my Act IV was literally "fight the BBEG here." The Acts got more and more reactive to the players, with just some notes to reinforce a theme here and there and to invoke plot beats. What those were became a lot more malleable. Sadly, that campaign folded in Act III due to out of game circumstances that required the group divorcing a player (illegalities were involved) and that soured the whole thing for me.
Still, the point of this was that you can definitely go a big Story game without a railroad. Set the hook early, get PC buy-in to the plot, and then let go and follow along.
Also, there's a poster on this board that played FATE in a very scripted way. I was surprised, but looked at what they said they did and I could see it. FATE doesn't really require a free-form approach. AW and BitD, though, will fight you tooth and nail if you try.
I disagree stakes are laid down in 5e are victory or defeat, or that a strong story requires that approach. That it's a common thinking I won't disagree, but that, to me, is a failing in how all D&D presents combat: the assumption is that the stakes are death and losing is dying. This isn't at all required by the game design but it's still a strong holdover from it's wargame roots. The easiest "fix" to boring D&D combat is to move the stakes from life or death to something else -- make combat the obstacle to a goal rather than the ends itself.