Now this? You won't hear me argue about any of this.
4e aimed to be maximally transparent. I'm fairly sure Heinsoo and the other designers thought that if the rules were clear and clean, no muss no fuss, that they would be giving people what they wanted, rules that "fall away" or "get out of the way" because there would be no difficulty in seeing how they worked. As soon as you knew what a certain keyword meant, you would know what it meant everywhere. Learn the basic lingo, and everything else falls into place. This would free players and DMs to tell the stories they liked, unburdened by cumbersome verbiage that many of them would have ignored anyway.
This proved incorrect. Many players disliked the layout and presentation, seeing it as sterile and formulaic. Even though spells have always been formulaic, this made their formulaic nature seemingly too obvious. Despite flowery natural language being objectively more difficult to parse (consider the many complaints in ye olden dayse about how difficult it was to use 3e monster star locks), players valued the texture and implicit weight of that presentation, even if they never actually intended to use even a single sentence of it (whether due to not wanting that specific item/spell/etc., using a homebrew world where such details would be overridden, using house-rules that modified things too far, etc.)
I would in fact call this an objective decrease in quality, making the game more opaque, more involved to use, because a degree of "clunky" engagement, where you must carefully parse the whole text of (say) a particular spell in order to use it correctly, is in fact desirable to many existing players. It is less desirable to new players, but 5e was always about targeting lapsed fans well enough to keep things going. New players were always a secondary concern. If it had been meant for new players specifically, I can guarantee the early levelling experience would have been quite a bit different.
