I wanted to clarify that when I say that it's obvious to me that Wizards made an active decision not to include the cohort of people who were fans of 4e (especially those of us who were not too keen on Essentials) in their big tent I'm not making any claims about what they should have done. I don't think it's any fan's place to feel entitled to anyone's creative labor. It was actually probably a smart business decision for them because to do otherwise would mean not bringing other elements of their coalition.
I'm also not saying that they took nothing from 4e. I'm saying they did not ask us anything. They assumed they knew what we valued. They made tone deaf statements that belied a lack of understanding. What drew me back to Dungeons and Dragons with 4e was that it had an evocative setting that grounded players in the center of its conflicts, had this visceral energy, and mechanics with strong themes and helped you feel your character's mentality. That it's mechanics had teeth. That as a GM I did not need to focus on pacing nearly as much.
When I say it (5e) lacked what was great about 4e I mean exactly that. That it lacks the spirit of the game. It's heart. It's tension. While definitely different games Pathfinder Second Edition and Exalted Third Edition are the only games that come close (to its spirit) in my estimation. It definitely has stuff from 4e, just not the right stuff to enable the sort of play I came to expect from 4e.
That's fine though because it's still a damn fine game. It does what does better than any other game on the market. When it comes to dungeon fantasy as a vehicle for GM storytelling or the sort of play we see in something like Critical Role it's amazing. It's approachable. Smooth at the table. I can't wait to play this weekend.
I get genuinely excited to play 5e, but I feel like when I talk about it with fans I'm in this place where I get judged for insufficient fandom.
It's hard to be sure that 5e didn't actually appeal to a lot of 4e players. There was obviously a particular culture of 4e players online who were alienated by 4e, but it's really hard to know how big that culture was, and what percentage of 4e players really belonged to it. Certainly at the height of 4e, there seemed a very different attitude to 4e on Rpgnet from what I remember from the WOTC Gleemax boards.
I suspect that the 4e players who made connections between 4e and what indy games were doing, and saw 4e as a game to be creatively reskinned and the like, was probably the most online visible component. A lot of the intended audience for 4e seemed to have been people who were playing late 3.5 and complained about balance issues and the like. While it's obvious that a lot of those players were alienated by 4e and went with Pathfinder, it seems likely that many of these players made the transition to 4e and probably still made up the majority of 4e players (at least initially).
Certainly there were a lot of such players on the WOTC board, and from what I remember the optimisation board was pretty much exclusively these players.
Which is not to say, people are wrong to feel that 5e threw their preferred style of play under the bus, but rather that the efforts WOTC did make to incorporate 4e elements into 5e might not have seemed quite so unsatisfactory to
all 4e players.
There also often seems to be the assumption that people either loved 4e or they hated it and abandoned it completely - due to how toxic the online edition war was.. Every edition has had players who stuck with it because it was the current edition and it at least fixed some of the blatant issues with what came before, while probably not being entirely satisifed with it. This almost certainly included a lot of Adventurer's League players who played it primarily because it was what there was available at their local store, and new players who began with 4e and didn't know any different. It could be that for many of these players 5e seemed less like a betrayal of what they knew and more like an improvement. (Or perhaps better in some ways, worse in others).
When we get right down to it, 5e appeals to a lot of 1e players, even if it's alienating to some members of the hardcore 1e OSR crowd who think it's style of play is completely antithetical to what they enjoy. I'm not sure it's necessarily so different with 4e.