I agree with both Abstruse and FireLance. I see no rational reason why powers that recharge after a short rest should require every encounter to be an elaborate set piece, but 4E as a whole certainly encouraged that approach to adventure design. This approach pervaded everything from the formatting of published adventures to the math for XP budgets. The most concrete rule that demonstrated the degree to which this approach was baked into 4E's DNA is the rule for milestones, which required the DM to explicitly designate what counted as a "real encounter."
So I think there can still be a place for powers that recover after a short rest, but I definitely won't miss an overemphasis on the Encounter as the fundamental building block of adventures.
Hold on, I actually don't mind encounter powers per se, especially in 4e. And I have no problems rationalizing being able to do something once but needing a five minute breather to do it again. It's your flying dropkick, the haymaker punch, the crane kick, the Matrix bullettime dodge, Rob Van Dam's Rolling Thunder. It's something you can do, but it takes a lot out of you and you can't do it more than once without resting and stretching out your muscles. And if I can justify it for a martial character, I sure as hell can for a caster.
Encounter-based powers in and of themselves are not a bad thing. They become a bad thing when they start piling up on each other or dominate to the point that they shift the entire adventure design paradigm to an encounter-based design. That's when your DM has to start making every encounter dangerous in order to keep up and that's when the problems start happening. If every class gets an encounter power every level or three, then you start getting a problem.
Honestly though, I don't see a huge difference between a "you get it back after a short rest" power and a "you can use this X times per day" power like the little class benefits from Pathfinder for wizards and clerics or the various racial abilities. What's the real difference between "You can do this after a short rest" vs. "You can do this a number of times per day equal to your (attribute modifier) plus two"? All the latter does is guarantee that a min-maxer's going to spam it even more.
And even encounter-based design isn't really that bad when compared to the alternative. The whole reason they went with the AED power structure was an attempt to fix the 10 Minute Workday problem. And honestly, it kind of did. It just caused a new problem. Whichever one is the bigger issue really depends on your group and your personal tastes. For me, the difference is solely in tone. A 1st/2nd/3.x/PF game to me is an adventure story, while 4e is an action story. Neither one is really better or worse than the other, they're just different approaches to telling the story and bring a different tone to the game.
Personally, I'd like to see a way to get the best of both worlds. "You can use this ability 3 times per day, but you must take a short rest after each use to be able to use it again." Possibly with another mechanic to allow them to be saved up to be spammed multiple times before a short rest, but causes you to be winded (move half speed and have disadvantage on attacks until you take a short rest). A little something like that could be just the boost to balance out a weaker class/theme combo against the other classes, and it also gives you more interesting tactical options and can force you to make some tough choices in combat.
Really though, all of this are things that really shouldn't be in the core rules. If they do decide to put encounter powers back in the game, even with limitations like I wrote about, those should be in a rules module like the advanced combat, or specific optional character themes that aren't "core".
