Just wanted to expand on this point. The issue wasn't that 4e didn't have outside combat resources- it totally did (Rituals, Martial Practices, Feats, Utility Powers). The problem came that, when you had a decision point for say, a new Feat or Utility Power that added out of combat utility (say, the Animal Empathy Feat, which granted +2 to Nature checks, and allowed you to use Nature as Insight when dealing with Beasts or Arcane Porter, which allowed your Familiar to carry a 5 lb. object), most players realized that they didn't know when/if such things would be useful. But they absolutely knew that Backstabber that turned d6's of Sneak Attack into d8's or Battlewise, allowing you to use Wisdom to determine initiative, would come up, because combat was inevitable, and the failure state of combat was perceived to be much worse than the failure state of a non-combat test or Skill Challenge (not always true, you could die in a Skill Challenge, but I only saw that one time during Scales of War).
It was because 4e presented it as a choice between "choose combat bonus" vs. "choose non-combat bonus" that was the real problem. You can still see this in 5e, where I've rarely seen anyone take the flavorful non-combat Feats (beyond things that boost Perception/Investigation like Observant) over new combat options (something exacerbated by the fact that you get fewer Feats which compete with ability score improvements). The difference is mostly that classes come packaged with combat and non-combat abilities, and spells are a mix of combat and utility effects.
