If GMs read the stuff I quoted, plus the stuff that Obryn has mentioned, and still conclude that fireballs can't be used to burn trees, acid breath to damage locks and icy terrain to freeze ponds, even when playes make requests to the contrary, I don't think the blame lies primarily with the rulebooks.
Pemerton, it's not I who concluded that fireballs only targetted creatures, it's the DMs I played with. It's easy enough in retrospect to point to this or that obscure passage (yes I have heard of p42...but only a year after every single gamer I know -- and I know and have played with dozens at the local gaming center and in several groups and campaigns - and they pretty much all quit 4e out of frustration and boredom).
I realize now that with a very good DM, 4e could be more relaxed/realistic and less cookie-cuttery and repetitive, but you gotta ask yourself, is a side bar of houseruling powers to do strange things likely to be used / referred to in most games? In my experience, no. DMs usually want a quick and consistent way to adjudicate these things, and find that if they deviate from RAW too much, they might set a precedent and get hit with a broken combo. The impression one gets from a 4e character sheet is not one of too many options, but too many rigid options, such that if you took the time to pick your at-will to combo with this feat and this encounter power and this class feature, that you should use those powers. I tried arguing with my DM before we even started our campaign, and he told me no, acid breath doesn't melt metal, and no, you can't turn on your torch or set that barn on fire and do ongoing HP damage to all objects inside for as many rounds as it takes for them to all be turned to cinder, because he'd be right...those powers are not balanced for that. They're balanced around a very limited, in-encounter ideology. It's like out of combat the world goes in 5 minute chunks, and in combat a 5 minute chunk of time can be 30 seconds or 10 minutes.
The point isn't that there aren't quirky sidebars and rare rules that you can dig up on the forums, but one of perception and practical usage. I've never, EVER seen page 42 used at a live gaming table. Not once. Maybe others here have, and maybe the DMs I played with all sucked at 4e, but the atmosphere at so many of those tables ended up being a game of one-upsmanship between the PCs trying out builds of classes they just got access to in this month's update and on the forums, and errata making their perfectly fine character completely borked when neither the players nor the DM thought it was OP. Of course, there are many broken things in every edition, but you cannot rely on a game so dictated by RAW back and forth arguments and updates having this sort of flexibility taken seriously. It's like going into court and with a stack of law books on the table, you cast all that aside, and ask for jury nullification in every case you try. Not gonna happen.
As for creative use of spells in AD&D, a "straight up" usage of Teleport was a game of russian roulette. I'm not surprised other creative mages came up with some similar tactics that I did, but that was before these forums were popular and certainly I got all my ideas by analyzing my spell descriptions like a lawyer would in between turns. Very bookish and studious...almost mage-like, you would say. Ask me how many times I've read over the powers on my 4e sheets. A few, but only in the edge cases. There were dozens of creative combos I came up with in AD&D. Here's an example : We were chasing an enemy pirate ship that was faster than us, and faster than any fly spell. A moving target. Scrying didn't help to teleport to it either, it had serious negatives and if we ended up the wrong place, it would be a bad swim full of sharks. On top of that, our ship was much, much weaker and couldn't possibly survive a one-on-one battle, and the captain forbade us from tomfoolery and playing a game of chicken. So what I came up with triangulating their navigation, on an intercept course, flying up, invisible (with the fighters carrying me and the other unarmored people, so we could all fly with my limited uses), and in an area of invisibility we just floated and waited for the other ship to fly to us instead of trying to catch it. We landed, killed the guys on the roof, and did all sorts of interesting things thereafter. I went up a level for that, since it wasn't an obvious thing to do. Sure, there were other options, such as charming our own captain to let us navigate closer, or make a canoe invisible, but the point is...a wizard in an earlier game, could plan out...take so and so many instances of fly, invis, stoneskin, teleport, fireballs...and deck out the group to take on a pirate king on his own turf. It required weighing all the PCs gear, calculating the speed of the ships and how long we'd have to wait in the sky suspended, contingencies if that failed, escape routes if the plan turned to heck.
I am telling you, forget about doing 90% of the stuff we did in that campaign in a 4e game. Just cannot happen. We had a pathfinder game that went to 8-9th level that in six months gave us so many more epic stories and incredible feats of ingenuity, fun, and roleplaying, that I just want Next to build on those experiences instead of the grind of same-old-same-old. I tried to have as much fun in 4e, I really did. We all did. And in the end, failed. Sure, it was fun sometimes and we have some great moments. But they were much fewer and farther in between, and not consistent enough to keep people excited about playing.
All that said, I'd rather play a melee type in 4e than in AD&D...they sucked + were boring. At least a 4e fighter had some tactics. Even my 4e paladin was way more interesting than my old AD&D paladins...but the overall game and story were just better. There was more story to crunch on, because rather than the entire game be focused on in-combat use of abilities, it was focused on a bunch of things, making the melee fighter boringness much less of an issue.
