Yeah, I just disagree that this is the case. There are as many traps inherent in the original 4e magic system as there are in the rarity system, but the rarity system has fixed a number of problems.
1) You noted above that there 'very few items' that are a problem There's a good reason for this, all the ones that were a problem were nerfed practically to irrelevance. The original system left VERY little room for developers to work in, it was a very constrained design space. Every item needed to be made such that any number of cheap copies of it wouldn't cause an issue. The result was bland items.
I think you're exaggerating the magnitude of this issue. Most items aren't interesting to copy in 100's of numbers. Any slotted item, for instance, is largely uninteresting to have many of around. Item powers are also balanced by the fact that they don't generally scale with level or (if weapons/implements) that they require you to hit with that weapon/implement or at least wield it - meaning you pretty much have to be wielding a level-appropriate items since the cheaper versions have too low an enhancement bonus. And to the extend that items become out-of-combat toolkits, this isn't necessarily problematic, although you'd want to consider it.
2) Another constraint on the design space was the requirement that daily item uses be restricted to a small number. This means that players don't really have the option to use daily item powers which are not competitive. Only a narrow range of daily item powers are thus viable and many interesting powers which would be somewhat useful if allowed once per day are simply ignored because they now have to compete not only with other items that could go into the same slot, but the daily powers of ALL other items the character might have. This is too constraining.
But this restriction is again entirely artificial. Most of these daily powers would be fine if players could use several each day.
3) From a fluff perspective you can't easily achieve a setting where magic items aren't a commonplace commodity. Higher level PCs can simply churn out 100's of instances of lower level items. Even if this isn't something the PCs want to spend their own treasure on you can't really justify any sort of low availability of lower level items. The only thing you can do that logically makes sense is to make low level items almost worthless, but that doesn't work either because low level PCs need good interesting items that are effective for them at the levels they can acquire them. Every garden variety NPC bad guy that has any possibility of being able to craft items (and it is hard to see how many of them wouldn't) would logically festoon his henchmen with useful googaws.
I see where you're coming from, and the criticism makes sense. I just don't think it's particularly problematic. D&D has always had rules that, when interpreted on a broader scale suggest odd economies that seem not to work; and the solution has always been to just ignore it. So a priori, I don't think this is a huge issue: you can make some story up, and just go with it. Secondly, the rarity system doesn't really fix this: if items are truly rare, why are you finding them all the time? And in any case, common items are still available in mass. Then there's the nonsense of the selling price: the more common a (non-perishable, tradable) good, the less it makes sense to have such a large difference between buying and selling price: yet 4e's sale price for common magic items is ludicrously low: that's obviously nonsensical, yet everyone just takes it in their stride. Ironically, the uncommon+rare items have
smaller resale price drops (which is again just nonsense from a fluff perspective). But the point is: none of this is the focus of the story, so you avoid harping on it and make up some superficially plausible story, and that's that.
Given the realities of the economics of making items in the first place ironically the characters were STILL mostly dependent on the DM to give them the good stuff anyway, but the system had to bear the disadvantages of the loopholes and limitations forced on it by the way it worked.
The problematic economics haven't been fixed by the item rarity rules: it's even worse now since a large portion of the items cannot be crafted at all. And in practice, in the old system, allowing complete player control worked perfectly fine. In effect, that's what the DMG always suggested to do with wishlists, though I prefer random loot.
So we're losing a system that had it's flaws but worked for something that has little to recommend it. I think the idea that some items are unique and non-craftable is neat and exploitable; but the addition of rares would have been sufficient; I don't see the motivation for the uncommons. And the loss is great, since now suddenly the DM needs to micromanage items in a way he previously didn't (or remove uncommon items from player purview, in which case so few items remain that a major source of PC customization has disappeared).
Then of course any change starts with a net negative since you're imposing a hassle and downgrading compatibility with existing material.
So we're really not gaining
anything with the new system, and we're losing a lot.
Finally, as a guy who's played D&D since the very earliest days of the game I don't actually think the whole 'bad DM' thing holds a lot of water.
I'm not exactly sure what you're refering to with bad DM's, but my issue is with DM required system mastery. I've played with novice DM's in the old system, and that works: the DM builds his story and let's the players build the PC's (including items). In the new system, you're forcing the DM to pick and choose for the players, and from my experience, these DM's simply cannot. As far as I'm concerned, it's not the DM's fault that the system is overcomplicated. It's not the DM that's bad, it's the item rarity system which requires excessive DM knowledge that's bad. It's just unnecessary.
Obviously no one approach is going to please everyone, but I think the rarity system took a huge step in eliminating some glaring flaws. Beyond that you can still do virtually the same thing with it you could do before, so it seems both better (to me) and is more flexible in general.
Which flaws is it exactly eliminating? All I can see is that it's eliminating player options, and involving the DM (who just because he's DM doesn't mean he knows the details of each PC and items that fit it) in an additional task he can really do without. Not to mention the fact that even
if the DM knows the system, he's unlikely to know what the player wants unless he's a mind reader. E.g. if selecting an item for a polearm-fighter, do you pick a powerful spear or do you know of polearm momentum and pick rushing cleats instead? And if you do, was that what he wanted in the first place?
Note in particular that these kind of tactically interesting builds become impossible to pull off under the new system without active DM cooperation. That's a big loss, IMHO.
