Actually, I am going to disagree with you hear a bit.
For what it’s worth, nobody seems to be talking about the most mechanically interesting dragons that WotC published in D&D: the (chromatic dragons from 2011’s Monster Vault (a core product 4E’s Essentials product line).
Actually, I lot of people talk about how good 4e monster design was (a bit exaggerated IMO) and in particular Threats from the Nentir Vale. I do agree that book is probably the high water mark, or close to it, for 4e monster design.
By 2011, WotC had finally nailed down their monster math for 4E,
I would say the monster math was improved, but not "nailed down." At high levels and for solos, the monsters were terrible under powered. Blog42 did a great article on this: how, relatively speaking, epic level 4e monsters were weaker than heroic tier 4e monsters. The math is pretty straightforward and MM3 only helped very slightly. I used the revised monster level damage in blog42 for my 4e monsters and they ran much better.
For these dragons in particular, the designs leaned hard into 4E’s monster roles.
Actually, by MM3 they back away from the roles a bit. You will notice the changed the monster math so the roles were mechanically (from a numbers standpoint) more similar. I don't know that they really added many abilities that made them better suited to their role either. They typical had those from the get go, IIRC.
All of these dragons were also “solo” monsters, meaning they were designed to fight alone against a party, but the specific roles gave each one vastly different tactics and mechanics to support those tactics. A red dragon was a “solo soldier”, so it stayed in melee and got a freebie claw or bite attack on initiative 10, regardless of what other actions it took. A blue dragon was a “solo artillery”, so on initiative 10 it would fly a short distance (without provoking opportunity attacks) and then breathe a “lightning burst” area attack at some distant foes. In addition to their classic breath weapons, most of those dragons also had another form breath weapon that recharged separately and supported the dragon’s role (the blue dragon’s lightning burst is one example). There were many more unique features that protected these dragons’ action economy too. I highly recommend folks at least review these designs directly—they’re really fun to play.
I do agree the variety between different types of dragons was superior in 4e, with 1 caveat: You get that and sometimes more when you consider the lair actions 5e provides for each dragon type.
These were the last core dragons released before 5E… and 5E’s monster design in 2014 was a major step backward.
Not really. In a lot of ways 5e dragons are mechanically superior to 4e dragons. Overall, I think they are about on par.
Legendary actions / mythic actions / legendary resistance / mythic trait are arguably better for solo play than the 4e solos which got 2 action points, and one "instinct action" by MM3 to deal with action economy and lock-down. If you include 5e lair actions, and you should, 5e dragons are likely superior than 4e dragons (and this is without including spellcasting variants). With all the options turned on, 5e dragons have superior action economy and lockdown prevention to 4e dragons, and similar type differention diversity
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