TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
<My final thoughts on this, I promise>
I maintain a theory (and if there is proof to substantiate it, I'd love to see it) that 4e was released "half-baked". For whatever reason, it was rushed out the door without enough time to fix the issues it had. The core books alone suffered some of the worst problems, including (but not limited to)
...
Yep, thats why it was mentioned up thread.
I have been involved in some projects like this. You strike out, play around with something, stop, go another direction, tack back, tear down, rebuild....and then have to release something that can look surprisingly rough for everything that went into it. They clearly reached a point where they had to get something out there, and, on top of that, use it as a base for a wave of problematic initial material.
But it wasn't just this. It was not just one thing. (Maybe it was an underlying thing, like bad management, but not one thing with the game). If you read this thread, there are a lot of "one thing" replies, that are different things.
I will give an example not mentioned yet. Towards the end of 4E they added a collectible card component, so you could add essentially another layer of powers to your character. And any 4E fan knows that those characters needed yet more powers (either in terms of char build or on the char sheet), like piling some dirt on top of the mountain.
The never stopped until the edition did.