If you’ll excuse a nitpick, and forgive me the contradiction as someone who has a burning hot hatred of nitpicking in general, that does rather seem like combat length created the perception that the game is laser focused on combat.
Which is totally valid! But it isn’t exactly a whole different game when you play with the less meaty monsters of later 4e, and hand the players with analysis-paralysis issues and the players who can’t improv if there are defined ability widgets (both perfectly valid issues with 4e that essentials sought to fix while leaving the basic game alone for those of us who lacked those issues) an essentials class so they have 1 encounter power they can use 7 times. It speeds up combat dramatically, though.
Some of us kept fights fairly short by rarely fighting to the death (losing side flees or surrenders rather than being slaughtered), not using standards ever and only using brutes if they are the centerpiece of the fight, and cutting nearly all monster HP in half from the start, but damage vs hp math in 4e is simply wrong. They screwed it up. Full stop.
But! I am 90% sure that I could run a handful of 4e games for you and your group that would be chock full of roleplaying. We had many whole story arcs that feature maybe 3 fights over the course of 5-8 sessions. And if I can get some of my players improvising in 4e, I can get anyone doing it.
The problem, IMO, is that 4e
looks so combat centered, and deals with combat so differently in terms of designing a fight, and gets the math so wrong on HP vs damage, that these things compile to cause many groups to expect to be able to run x fights per session and still have time to RP out of combat, but then be unable to do so.