So now that I'm over my hissy fit, and playing a 4E campaign, the only criticism I have left is that 4E is...charmless. For me, it's like the new Mini. It's technically brilliant, but it trades entirely on the coolness of its predecessor without adding any of its own.
4E plays very smoothly, but that smoothness seems like a Teflon quality that prevents it from pinging my awesome-dar.
I felt this way at first too, but now I'm really enjoying it. I don't know if it was intentional, but 4e seems to invite DM creation--even in books like MoTP, what little fluff they have is just the opening paragraphs. You have to fill in the details.
At first this irritated me (MoTP is
thin!) but now I'm loving how I can put my own stamp on things. My orcs are hopped up on a viciously addictive leaf (that my players are experimenting with but haven't yet figured out, heh heh), my Feywild is modeled after Jim Butcher, and my dwarves have a fundamentalist "deep dwarf" sect. Many of these things were made up in the shower and have taken me all of 10 minutes each to flesh out enough to put in the game.
Sure, I could do this in other games, but something about 4e just makes it easier for me. I think it's because I'm
forced to--I can't look it up, so I have to make it up, and that's just fun. (Sure, I could have done this anyway, but I'm a new DM and I wouldn't have.) Also, it's mine, and so I can actually
remember the fluff.
Another thing that I'm enjoying is that the straightforward mechanics give me the opportunity to mess with the players.
They're so used to being able to identify magic items with a 5-minute short rest that they assume they know everything about everything they find. So I tell them part of the truth and when the big reveal comes, it will be even more surprising. Now the things that are truly significant can be mysteries and the rest just chugs along.