About 15 or so years ago I developed a hybrid version of AD&D, with added, modified, or rewritten materials of my own, which later adopted some elements of 3rd Edition and more recently some from 4E.
My group has played that ever since it first developed and so in a way I've never stopped playing AD&D, though greatly modified over time.
I've personally never felt or understood the impulse to play, "an Edition." I didn't even do this while playing AD&D as a teen. (Though I understand liking some editions more than others, overall, my core edition is AD&D, but many elements of that edition I've also discarded.) I like things from various editions and dislike things from various editions (or various games for that matter) and so do my various groups, though we can't play as much as in the past because of families, businesses to run, cases to work, social events, and other priorities.
The way I've always looked at it is, "it's just a basic fantasy RPG, and so I'll take it apart, strip out what I like and rebuild it as I wish." I guess it might be the inventor/designer inside of me, but I never saw D&D or even RPGs as anything more than text and idea collections of design components that I could use, discard, or modify as needed, and that applied to entire game system components as well as milieu development. Then again this seems the way it was with everyone else I knew who DMed back then, no-one played an edition "as was."
Talk to me, being an inventor and scientist, of nothing more than textual rules (which are in turn nothing more than an instruction set) being mechanical and fixed just strikes me as wholly odd and unreal. Metals and alloys are mechanical components, text is just linguistic or expressionistic theory on how things might operate in a given scenario, they are not reality - just hypotheses on how a thing might work. A verbal description. Text mechanics are to me, by very nature, "soft mechanics at best." They aren't really anything like hard mechanics or real mechanics. So I never got the edition wars because in the end you're arguing theory and opinion, and that's interesting and certainly worth debating, but you're not arguing anything you can absolutely actually prove or demonstrate, "hey, it always works this way," or, "it always works best this way." So soft mechanics isn't worth getting heated about because it's soft, and always theory at best.
So personally I am very glad to see talk that 5E will follow this same component concept (though they call it modular and that's also a very good term), because that's the way I/we have always done it, and I'm hoping there will also be interesting new elements within 5E that I can either adopt, add to, improve, or that will give me better ideas for my own designs and developments.
Still, my assumption so far, given the talk, and the way we do things, and the way 5E seems to be heading is that this will be the best edition of D&D since AD&D. So I'm looking forwards to that.
I have though recently thought about running my kids through an AD&D set of adventures for nostalgia's sake. To see how they would like the original Rangers and Paladins and Clerics and Wizards and Thieves. I think they'd get a kick out of that.
. My gaming shelf is right behind me right ow, so it's easy enough to do. In fact, until about an hour ago (when I shelved them), the 1e PH and 3e Cityscape were on my desk. 
