Why is it that most people don't like how minions work to begin with? I don't mean to antagonize, it just seems that the intention in "fixing" minions is often unclear. They're very simple to use as-is, and I'd like to understand more about why these kinds of edits make minions better than they are.
You are mistaken. People understand minions more than you seem to think.
Easy for the DM, lousy rules-wise for the game.
1) There are Encounter powers that effectively auto-kill minions (e.g. Winter's Wrath). Yawn. Next encounter. Why exactly is the DM handing out XP for this?
2) They are not a real challenge for players. Paper tigers. Comic relief at best (but redundant old comic relief after a while) unless the DM throws an entire platoon of them at PCs. I have seen my fellow players cheer when certain bad guys are killed. That never happens with minions. There is no sense of accomplishment or real fun. Killing a minion is just an exercise in rolling dice. Minion encounters, unless they have a lot of other interesting foes in them, tend to be filler between the real interesting and memorable encounters. In fact, the opposite should be true. Being attacked by 20 foes should be more memorable than most other encounters, but not when 16 of the foes are paper tigers. Then, it's just dice rolling. zzzzzzzzzzz
3) They encourage meta-gaming by players. Fighter: "Look 8 foes", Wizard: "No worries, they are minions, a simple Scorching Burst..."
4) One cannot Intimidate a minion and get it to surrender and spill the beans. Not because it does not make sense to intimidate a minion (it makes a lot of sense), but because the Intimidate game mechanics are mutually exclusive from the Minion game mechanics (or at least by implication, i.e. the implication is that bloodied targets will surrender, non-bloodied ones will not and minions cannot be bloodied).
5) There are minion rule exceptions to the normal rules which are merely meta-rules rules. The Wizard who fails the attack roll for a Fireball does nothing to a minion, but he can seriously damage or kill other creatures with it. The minion is immune. Why? Because of special stupid minion rule which is mutually exclusive from the half damage rules. This btw, is a serious game design flaw.
6) At higher levels when PCs have even more anti-minion tactics at their disposal, minions become even more of a joke.
7) Minions often do less average damage than non-minions with the same ability scores and weapons. Why? Merely to speed up the game a few seconds per attack.
8) Minions cannot critical. Boring. In our game, the DM rolls attack rolls in front of the players. Rolling a 20 and doing 4 points of damage is anti-climactic.
9) They encourage cliche-ish monster tactics by DMs. First, send in the waves of minions. Second, send in the real troops. Oh, your players have an anti-minion spell, then let's encourage the DM to send the minions in multiple waves instead of his original plan for them (this happened in our game when the DM realized that my Wizard was going to fry the entire encounter with one spell). In reality, the tactically smart thing for a large group of creatures to do is swamp the PCs with numbers. But, this doesn't work with certain 4E spells, so the DM is encouraged to do the opposite of what should be the tactically best move by the monsters. All because of game mechanics.
There is nothing wrong with a monster concept of a minion. It's a really good idea. Monsters that cannot quite last as long in a fight. The ability to have larger combats that are not auto-TPK. And, it's fun for the players of the PCs that are less brawny to be able to kill something in a fight more often than normal. The concept is totally fine.
It's merely the game mechanics which are designed for ease of DM bookkeeping as opposed to game rules consistency and fun that are so inferior.
