I voted zero, but for a different reason. I'm actually playing in a 4e game. It's not really grabbing me, but it's only session 2 at this point. We're all still mainly playing a minis combat game rather than an RPG. Hopefully once we get the mechanics under our belts it'll get better.
But anyway, the main reason I voted zero was because I bought thousands of dollars of 3e / OGL stuff. I enjoyed reading it, enjoyed thinking about it, but never used 99% of it. So I'm making a conscious choice NOT to get on the suppliment treadmill this time around. I'll stick to being a Savage Worlds junkie instead - the release schedule is a lot more manageable for my wallet. ;-)
There's probably a "backwards compatibility" issue at work for a number of people. Back when 1E came around, you could still use your OD&D stuff with it (especially if you used Supplement I: Greyhawk)... in fact the 1E MM was in many ways a transitional book. And you could use all your 1E and Classic stuff together with a small amount of conversion work... a very small amount. Not much trouble really.
When 2E came around, most stuff still carried over. Some folks were annoyed about them dropping Assassins and Monks, but you could always just buy 2E stuff and use it with the 1E rules, or make a hybrid. Cross-compatibility was really no problem.
So... you've got some 1E characters, a Classic adventure and some magic items from a 2E supplement? Duck soup.
When 3E came around the changes were more radical... but a lot of people (myself included) hadn't bought D&D stuff for a long time. The quality and subject matter had been all over the place, and in the last few years of TSR I don't think very many people were buying very much.
So I think that for many folks, 3E arrived as a breath of fresh air. Now, as a reboot of D&D it turned out that I really don't like it, and I know I'm not alone in that. But it really reinvigorated the brand and it did, as Philotomy Jurament has pointed out, get people discussing design philosophies. It brought a lot of things to the fore and made clear a lot of design issues that may have been obscure to a lot of folks. I think it's safe to say that the Old School Renaissance as we know it would not exist without 3E, D20 and especially the glorious OGL.
But 4E faces a different situation: not only is it really not backwards compatible with the billions of pages of D&D stuff that folks have accumulated over the years... it comes right on the heels of a very successful product line (3E).
So why do so many people balk at laying down large sums for 4E? I think it's hard for an edition of the D&D brand to be
neither backwards compatible nor "breaking a fast". See, 3E was somewhat backwards compatible (only partly, with work, but it was doable) but it broke the fast... it was famine times for the brand and all of the sudden a feast was laid out for the hungry customers (many of whom had or were soon going to have given up on the brand). So people were ready to really dig into it.
But 4E comes in being almost totally non-backwards compatible and also right on the very heels of a stream of hardbacks with a collected MSRP of probably several thousand dollars.
4E is essentially telling the customers to start over. That's a really, really hard sell and it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people are voting "Goose Egg". All of which is absolutely independent of any assessment of its merits or flaws as a game.
