I want to make a quick point. Many of the things that 77IM stated was not in 4E actually was, but it was covered in Unearthed Arcana articles, including how to craft object during downtime (achievements) as well as rules on building and buying strongholds. I am running a 4E game in FR and one of my players main focuses is to build their adventure company and expand their stronghold, not to mention crafting things up to wazoo.
I have complaints with both 3E and 4E, but it is not due to a lack of rules available to have your players feel engaged.
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Thank you for the clarification -- I guess I never got far enough in 4E to hit those rules. (And I really liked 4E and played it pretty solidly for a year and a half.) To be fair, the stronghold rules in 3E were relegated to a supplemental book that didn't come out for a couple of years either.
This brings up a very interesting phenomenon: There is a difference between placing a rule in a core book, a supplement, a thirdparty supplement, a UA article, and a house rule document. When we say, "5E doesn't need more rules," I assume we are mostly talking about the core rules. I mean, nobody can stop rules from appearing in house rules documents, and thirdparty supplements are hard to prevent too; but people don't give those rules as much weight, either. Official rules supplements are a kind of gray area, though.
For example, some people would say, "Just give people* the magic-item-pricing rules they want in a supplement, and I'll just not use that at my table." But other people would say, "No no no, if it's in an official supplement, players will expect it to be available as an option, and it will worm its way into all our games."
Personally, I feel that when people ask for more rules to exist in an official form (and not in a thirdparty supplement or UA article), it is precisely because they WANT those rules to become de-facto "core" rules -- which is precisely the thing that leads to rules bloat.
It's not enough to label a subsystem optional; if your only options are to use a rule subsystem or ignore it, it becomes very hard to ignore it. The only way I could imagine Wizards introducing such supplemental rules without establishing them as new de-facto core rules is to release multiple versions. For example, if they simultaneously released three separate, equally official, incompatible rules systems for pricing magic items, people would have to select which one to use, and there wouldn't be any assumptions that one is better than the other.
* People = CapnZapp 
