So I think 4E is a fine game. It's fairly well balanced. The rules are sensible and logical.
That's some of the game's main strengths. Balance and (mostly) well-written rules.
To me, the biggest difference is the design focus. Whereas the first few editions of D&D were focused on dungeon exploration, second edition was focused on campaign design, and third edition was focused on character design - 4E had a narrow focus on encounter design. You're going to go through a string of thematic battles. In the modules, they would have a two-page spread showing a battlemap made from crude tiles (sold separately) - with the overall dungeon maps being a simple flowchart from battle to battle.
Exactly. 4E knew what it was and did the hell out of that one thing. It's a maps & minis tactical skirmish-level monster-fighting game. And for that, it sings. You can see why they designed it that way. Look around the forum. Or any D&D forum, really. Most people are constantly on about how they only need rules for combat and how they don't want rules for social encounters as they can improvise those. The game that WotC produces is a monster-fighting game. All the social interaction and exploration, etc that you do at your table is up to you. WotC isn't providing that. You are. You can choose to include or exclude that aspect of play. It's up to you. WotC gives you the barest of bare-bones mechanics for that and let's you make the call.
There was no real sense of exploration or discovery, no game outside the battles. [I mean, sure you had a couple pages that discussed the Skill Challenge so you could gloss over exploration challenges. And you had rituals - which pretty much no one used, but if they did, it was to help you in future battles.]
I had the opposite experience with rituals. We used them all the time and they weren't only about combat prep. Rituals covered all the non-combat magic, so they were used regularly.
Skill challenges had the core of a fantastic idea wrapped in bad explanation, too restrictive implementation, and bad math. The core of the idea is clocks and countdowns. Something that was so well done later in Blades in the Dark it practically revolutionized the industry.
We switched to something far closer to BitD while playing 4E. It worked like a charm. We used it for everything that was more involved than one roll that wasn't combat. Freed of the bad math and restrictive implementation, the core idea absolutely sings.
In D&D 4E, it's a miniature skirmish game where one side (the heroes) is expected to win 99.9% of the time.
Yep. That's the core problem of modern, WotC-era D&D. In TSR-era D&D combat was deadly and best avoided. WotC centered combat in all of their editions but, as a result, could not make it deadly. Which they didn't figure out until
after 3X. I believe the phrase was rocket tag. At a certain point, if you won initiative...you won the fight. So they fixed that. But, that also removed all the tension from combat. Combat in both 4E and 5E is mostly a pointless slog. There's effectively zero chance of losing, there's effectively no chance of dying. You just throw dice until the referee gives you the win most times. Modern combat is so boring I'd rather return to the lethality of combat in the TSR-era and OSR-style games or handle combat as a group check or skill challenge.
The only real way to run modern combat that's in any way interesting is to, paradoxically, ignore the combat. Focus on terrain, secondary objectives, puzzle combats & monsters, grandiose set-piece encounters, etc. The 4E DMGs are the best WotC ever produced for creating this kind of exciting, action-adventure D&D combats.
