It's got nothing to do with bad rules good rules. Some people prefer the rules of football and some people prefer the rules of baseball. To some people, football is boring while baseball is exciting.
Comparing 4e to other eds of the game is not like comparing baseball and football. It's like comparing modern American football to football as it was played in America before the forward pass.
Rules can be good or bad and can be judged as such. There are both qualitative and quantitative assessments to be made, and both objective observations and subjective impressions that might go into that judgement, of course.
Being good rules or bad rules are down to personal opinion and not a fact.
Whethere you like a rule set is opinion. Whether a rule set fails to function in areas it was intended to cover is not. Prior eds of D&D broke down over much wider ranges of use than 4e does. 4e is a better rule set by that criterion, among others.
That a game has well-designed, functional rules doesn't oblige anyone to like it, though.
The way the current rules are does not appeal to him and he wishes for something different. If he likes the old rules then he probably likes the old rules that actually worked and not the parts that didn't.
I rather doubt that. The functional aspects of, say, 3.0 or AD&D were mostly clustered in a level range - arguable, but maybe 3rd-12th or 4-7th - 4e expanded that range. If you liked AD&D when it was working, you'd probably like 4e, when it's working (which is most of the time). OTOH, if you enjoyed the spectacle of AD&D breaking down at higher levels, you'd be dissapointed by 4e, which may become a bit less functional at Epic, but not in nearly the same way AD&D or 3e used to.
There is nothing wrong with people wanting the old rules, but having them redone to fix what was wrong and still give the same play experience that the old editions gave us minus the problems.
Actually there is. It's self-contradictory. The play experience of an old ed is a combination of it's good points /and/ it's flaws. You 'fix' an old ed, you change it's feel. If you're out to find an old feel, you're looking to re-institute old problems.
4th edition has nothing to actually compare it to in order to deem it better rules or not.
Well, there is every other ed of D&D - and it does come out ahead by many a reasoned comparison.
You can't say well 4th edition has this and does it better than 3rd edition because the systems are both totally different.
Totally different? They aren't both medieval fantasy games? They don't both use a d20 vs a DC resolution mechanic? Classes? Hps? Races? Feats? Skills? Wizards who prepare spells? Cyclical innitiative with Delay and Ready actions? They don't both favor 'focus fire' as a tactic, or require a party to have some healing resources to succeed?
Actually they're quite similar, not least of all because they /are/ both D&D.