Also, it'd be neat if they brought back Nentir Vale for 2024 edition. 4E fans have been waiting long enough.
It would certainly be neat, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I don't think we have to speculate too much.
You just described 5e.
5e keeps most 4e mechanical changes, but, then uses the older lore and canon. And becomes the edition where everyone who disavowed 4e as not even a role playing game or just a board game or whatever, suddenly jump up and down singing how fantastic 5e is.
4e's mistake wasn't in the mechanics but in the presentation.
The bigger issue, for me, isn't that 5e keeps the changes shorn of lore. As
I have previously argued, 5e does keep a number of things only at a really superficial level, and the changes don't often serve particularly useful ends
apart from traditionalism purely for its own sake, not because it's a more effective mechanic.
Skill challenges? AEDU classes? Being yelled at to heal?
Skill Challenges, from what I can see, got reworked into Downtime Activities. AEDU is "gone,"
other than buffing casters (cantrips and, to a lesser extent, rituals), which frankly seems to have pissed off pretty much everyone other than the hardcore caster fans. The old school fans find that much magic thrown around unacceptable or implausible. The 4e fans see how the equal-opportunity aspect has been ripped from at-wills and get annoyed that they couldn't have just...y'know, reworked it instead.
That third is a BS edition-war screed that I will not dignify with further response than this sentence calling it out for what it is.
People making things up about it.
Actually, in my experience, the bigger issue is "confidently saying it did something awesome that was actually done before."
Usually done by 4e, the Edition that Time Forgot, but not always, I've seen some praise for allegedly-innovative stuff that can be traced back all the way to 3e.
Not to belabour this old chestnut but it’s funny. In 5e every single character can tell their own arms back on. But apparently having a class that can let you spend hit dice is unbelievable.
Yeah, this. Also every Fighter is
especially good at yelling her own arms back on, and if she's a Banneret, she can do it to
three other people simultaneously. It's even
explicitly described as "you learn how to inspire your allies to fight on past their injuries."
Monster roles? Minions, elites, solos? Class roles?
God, I wish. The last kinda-sorta-ish, if you account for the Essentials line creating cross-role subclasses. Fighters are only really functional as strikers or pseudo-defenders in 5e, since the Banneret is......
sub-par, shall we say, for actually keeping a team going.
Defining what happens when you flank?
Ugh, don't remind me. Almost as bad as "
[a thing] I like to call 'passive perception.'" (I would use a direct link, but I'm afraid WotC scrubbed away all the old stuff, so an archive will have to do. Much like how they scrubbed out that one poll that showed that Druids were less popular than Warlords or the article where one of the designers half-jokingly crapped on anyone who likes dragonborn....)
WotC was already, intentionally or not, erasing 4e three years before 5e hit the bookshelves.
4E had lore? More like a mishmash of nonsense.
Oh come the frak on. 4e has plenty of delightful lore. The Dawn War, the War of Winter, the reason why deities don't stomp around on the mortal plane, actually USING the Plane of Shadow/Shadowfell and (effectively inventing) the Feywild, the Arkhosia/Bael Turath wars, the Raven Queen and her whole
thing, Bahamut's DIVINE ASTEROID ARK-SHIPS.
4e is bursting with great lore. You just don't like that its lore organizes things in a very different way compared to the Great Wheel. I, personally, thought that cutting all ties with the Great Wheel was one of the best choices they could have ever made. I understand that there are plenty of people who do not share that sentiment, and thus I do not go out of my way to crap on others' preferences or treat them as axiomatically inferior.
Another legacy of 4e that lives on in 5e: People crapping on anything it ever said or did as though it is objective fact that some "new" thing (no matter how new or old it may be) is inherently awful.
